The Ownership Economy

In this episode of the Ownership Economy podcast, Martin and Jahed speak with Zoe Schlag, a co-founder and Managing Partner at Common Trust. Zoe has spent her career as an entrepreneur and investor. Prior to Common Trust, Zoe served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s family office, where she designed and led their Shared Ownership investing. Before that, she was a Managing Director at Techstars, a global venture capital firm, where she led Techstars’ first impact fund and accelerator program. In the conversation, Zoe Schlag walks us through her learnings as an entrepreneur and investor and the evolution of her thinking on shared ownership. The conversation discusses in detail the concept of Employee Ownership Trust and Purpose Trusts, an entity type recently used by the founder of Patagonia to transition his company to steward ownership. As always, if you like the episode, please subscribe and rate us.

In this episode of the Ownership Economy, we connect with Nick Ducoff, currently a partner at G20 Ventures. Nick started his career as an attorney and quickly shifted into entrepreneurship. We discuss his learnings as an entrepreneur, investor, and DAO contributor and how these roles have impacted his view on creating value. As Nick is currently investing in ventures in the Ownership Economy, entrepreneurs and investors will be particularly interested in this episode. Nick will also be in Austin for South by Southwest 2023 through Monday if you would like to meet him. If you are interested in other takes on investing in this market, check out Episode 21 with Julia Lipton from Awesome People Ventures.

In episode 053, Martin and Jahed sit down with Sean Lee, co-founder of Odsy Network, the access control layer for blockchains. In the conversation, Sean covers his extensive experience in the space from working in the early days of the open source economy, realizing the need for economic support and incentive design, and shifting toward web3 models as the CEO of Algorand Foundation. Sean gives an intricate view of how governmental regulatory regimes are looking at crypto, from Singapore, Japan, and China, to Switzerland and the US, and how decentralized asset custody and permissionless yet safe access control can work with these new regulatory paradigms to the benefit of users and asset originators.

In this episode of the Ownership Economy, we connect with Professor Jan Eeckhout, a macroeconomist and labor economist and a Professor of Economics at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. Professor Eeckhout is the author of The Profit Paradox, which explores the secular trend since the 1980s in a consolidation of corporate power in the United States, its impact on labor and market competition, and the implications for modern democracies.

In episode 050, we sit down with Tim Rann, Managing Partner at Mercy Corps Ventures, and dig in to his background building businesses across Afghanistan, Cambodia, and other locales, and how he’s applying his insights in development finance to impact investing at MCV. We cover the opportunities for uniting impact with digital product design, how Tim and the team are thinking of impact with respect to climate and financial resilience, and how LPs are thinking about crypto projects and impact. This is a great episode for founders and LPs curious about the investment opportunity in open source protocols built with the developing world in mind.

In episode 049, Martin and Jahed sat down with Erin Grover, who formerly worked in international development in Afghanistan and India, and in investigative journalism, who transitioned into working in web3 in 2016. Erin covers her work on the ground with suppliers as diverse as farmer cooperatives, textile cooperatives, and the governments she worked with to sponsor blockchain projects for traceability. She also covers many real world examples to demonstrate how blockchains can bring accountability, transparency, and ultimately even higher revenues to stakeholders in multi-sided marketplaces.

In episode 048, Martin and Jahed sit down with Dr. Margot Clarvis, PhD, an environmental scientist working in the field of nature-based solutions (NbS), interfacing with the growing natural asset and carbon markets. In the course of the episode, Margot speaks to the trends that are at work turning nature into an ownable asset class with revenue potential, who the various stakeholders in the NbS space are, and how they’re working to build scientific consensus on natural assets and their revenue streams. We also touch on recent controversies in the voluntary carbon market, opportunities for blockchains to potentially solve trust issues in the market, and the evolution of these market-based solutions toward addressing development goals.

In this episode of the Ownership Economy, we check back in with Sascha Kellert from Ownco and Jessica van Meir from Mintstars for an update on their progress. Sascha walks us his new model for Virtual On-Chain Option Plans and discusses how an initial ten organizations are using the plan in practice. We then dive into how both entrepreneurs are thinking about shared ownership and governance programs in their early stage start ups. We hope you enjoy the episode.

In this episode of the Ownership Economy, we speak with Stephen Martin from TripsTrade. Steve comes from a background in the property rental market, a $2.3 trillion industry. Along with his co-founder Petro Sideris, Steve is working to build a new model for short-term property rentals, like vacations and hotel bookings. We all have at one point or another had to cancel a booking without a refund. TripsTrade aims to fix that entire market and in the meantime is building some interesting web2 to web3 tools that will help everyone more easily adopt blockchain technologies. We hope you enjoy the episode.

In this episode, we sit down with Amber Case of the Plurigrid project. In the conversation, we talk about the intersection of open source software economic models, cybernetics, anthropology, and how combining the three can open up new possibilities in distributed energy resources management and distributed, resilient, microgrids. We hope you enjoy the episode.