Mike Moyer

Lot of work happened in the last 5-10 years in the web3 space around tech-enabled participatory governance, with some funding backdrop because it's on top of a crypto platform. ENS is kind of the poster child

https://docs.ens.domains/learn/protocol/

In terms of participation incentive models I like pointing people to slicing pie. The concept is simple enough and can learned from their free materials. Helpful mental model quantifying sweat "equity" where equity can be voting shares, or actual financial shares:

https://slicingpie.com/

In terms of governance policy that is specific to your domain- what are the incentives and measures and countermeasures to ensure good behavior from the different roles of participants particular to therapy- there are certainly codes of conduct in the therapy space but probably this is going to be new work for you.

I have read quite a bit in the anarchy space, including Graeber, and Chomsky's references and pull-outs from the moments during the Spanish Civil War when there was real movement here- regret to say that the prior thinking does not strike me as anywhere near sufficient to serve as models for the current shape of the world. A lot of new work has to get laid down for these to be real things.

Democracy is a fragile mechanism that as we see can collapse quickly under lots of limited resource regimes and when community trust is fractured. High trust does not scale. Low trust is needed to scale and professionalize.

But +1, think now…

I just heard about this the other day:
http://slicingpie.com

Not sure if it works or not.

I think the current trend of 4 year vesting with a 1 year cliff (and 0.1%-0.5% for very early engineers in startups less than 7 people, as it seems on angel.co job postings) is totally messed up. It seems every startup wants to you take a $40k salary cut at least and isn't giving you equity anywhere close to that value (even optimistically, though it really should be at net present valuation. EG: If your last funding round was an incubator which put in $20k for %5, then your valuation is $400k, and each year that engineer gives up $40k in salary, he should get %10 of the company... until you do another round, at which the $40k will buy less of the company. But nobody is doing that...)

Don't even get me started on the one year cliff. Can you imagine any other investor in a startup taking a one year cliff? "Ok, we'll take your venture capital, but you're going to vest and it's got a cliff. If you act like jackasses in the first year we're going to cut you off and you get nothing"

Here's the magical thinking: Somehow investor dollars are more "real" than employee sweat, or lost salary the employee gave up to come work there.

Hell, if they pay you %60 of a market salary and then give you %40 as deferred salary, you should still get probably %4 of your salaries value in equity to compensate for the risk that the deferred salary will never be paid.

And why don't startups use…

Instead of a fixed equity allocation, have you considered a dynamic allocation system instead?

All contributions (cash, time, relations etc.) are converted into “slices”, with a certain multiplier for risk. For example:

* if someone contributes $X cash, they get 4X slices

* if someone contributes work that normally has a $Y hourly rate, they get 2Y slices for each hour

* if someone brings in a client for which they would have normally charged a $Z commission, they get 2Z slices

You freeze the pie when you are bringing in sufficient revenue to afford paying everyone a market salary.

% equity = slices owned / total number of slices

You can learn more about this method at https://slicingpie.com (not affiliated, just think it's a better way of going about this)

The book "Slicing Pie" delves into the topic of how to split equity before receiving any outside funding in detail:

https://www.amazon.com/Slicing-Pie-Funding-Company-without/dp/B00MFXJJYS

https://slicingpie.com/

The idea is to dynamically adjust equity based on how much everyone is contributing.

Some people report good experience using this dynamic split method:

https://cofounderslab.com/discuss/has-anyone-used-the-slicing-pie-method-of-managing-equity-allocations-through-a-grunt-fund

With that said, I am sure there are a lot of different methods that could work depending on the people involved, it's not as if there is only one "right" way to do it.

This formula is a way to unwind an unfair equity split. It is common for founders to take a disproportionate chunk of equity at the outset of the venture even though they may not really deserve it.

The Slicing Pie model ensures that each person on the team has exactly what they deserve to have. This would avoid unfair splits at the end that would need to be readjusted.

Here is an article about how it works: http://www.slicingpie.com/how-to-use-a-dynamic-equity-split-program-so-everyone-gets-what-they-deserve/

Having a small business or startup business with tons of decision to make is mind bubbling brain-wreck, but I tried reading the Book Slicing pie Mike Moyer and it all made sense, in his book he emphasized the startup equity by providing an example; also talked about splitting equity using the-grunt-fund-calculator grunt calculator and dig in to details on equity structure founders equity equity compensation, and differentiating your choice on salaries or equity. http://www.slicingpie.com