hisem

  As I wrote about in Being Geek, the Curse of the Silicon Valley is that great engineers are often promoted to leadership for their hard work. While many succeed in this role, an equal part fails because the skills required to lead are vastly different than the ones required to be an engineer. The Curse is that we’re often placing our most valuable engineers in a role where they’re predisposed to fail.

  Think of it like this: there’s a large population of immensely talented engineers that should not be leaders. There is no amount of training that would make up for the talent we’d extinguish by teaching them how to write annual reviews.

  But everyone wants to grow.

  Unfortunately, in many companies the only perceived growth path is via management.

I also believe that management should be about facilitating your team's work, rather than endorsing your team's responsibility.

I don't know how it works in other countries, but I can give some more detailed info about the requirements in France, if anyone's interested :

- A partner can own 50% max. of the company.

- Whether you own 1% or 50%, every partner has the same voting power.

- You can have a maximum of 1/3 non-employed partners, and the combined non-employed partners cannot own a majority of shares (49% max). This assures that the "power" stays within the people that actually work in the company.

- This also means that 2/3 of the partners must be employed with a contract and a salary. This can be quite difficult when you build the company as you must, technically, start paying yourself and your partner (since you must be 2 partners minimum) on day 1.

- You need a minimum of 2 partners, but can also have as many employees as you want. This means you can technically be a co-op even if your company has 2 partners and 1000 employees.

- There are rules as to how you distribute your benefits : a maximum of 33% can be distributed as dividends to the partners, a minimum of 16% must be kept in the company for investment (reserves), and a minimum of 33% has to be distributed amongst all employees (following a calculation the employees can decide upon, like according to time worked, salaries, how long one's been in the company, or a custom calculation...). This tends to lead to high employee motivation and better ensure long-term health.

- Co-operatives have a few tax deductions that other companies don't. If you don't distribute any dividends and distribute it all to your employees + keep some for investments, and follow a certain number of other rules, you can practically be exempted of taxes on the company's benefits.

- On the other hand, you must go through a bunch of red tape to prove every year that you follow the rules of a co-operative, which costs time and a bit of money.

We built the company 2 years ago, and right now we're only 3 partner/employees so our day-to-day life is basically the same as any other similar-sized company, but we liked the philosophy, and it has actually been an interesting marketing feature.

They have some very interesting talks, in particular the KOUDETAT videos - classes about startup-related subjects, from which I'm guessing they based KOUDETAT+ - and the "Les barbares attaquent" (the barbarians attack) where they explore the current disruption of a bunch of industries.