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What do you do when ideas are abundant but attention is scarce - and traditional economic models are expected to be unsustainable? All this while building a startup with a goal of generating profits with purpose.
This write-up outlines our long-standing vision of
I had defined the core primitives of this vision going as far back as 2022 when I began weaving our broader narrative for Zolidar. I even foreshadowed it in our very first podcast, where I concluded: “We ultimately hope that the community will eclipse Zolidar itself in the impact that it can have on small businesses”.
Below we share the opening chapter of our narrative for implementing stakeholder-ownership for The Grid - our knowledge graph and community connecting 60k+ orgs, people, and curated content to form the comprehensive ontology for the employee-ownership domain. Read on.
Ben Thompson’s Stratechery piece on Content and Community outlines a fascinating historical journey of human communication revealing how each technological leap fundamentally shifted the center of power - and how Artificial Intelligence represents a disruption unlike any other.
In the earliest times, power resided with the speaker; the creation, delivery, and consumption of ideas were all one.
With the advent of writing, the bottleneck shifted to duplication, and power became concentrated in institutions like the Catholic Church, which held a de facto monopoly on recording and preserving information.
The printing press then revolutionized duplication, moving the bottleneck to distribution. This era saw the rise of publishing empires and the formation of nation-states, where power shifted to national monarchs and meritocratic nobility who leveraged copyright as a government-granted monopoly to build wealth and control information spread.
The internet then commoditized distribution, making it free and accessible to all. This led to an overwhelming abundance of content, and power shifted to aggregators like Google, who could organize and make sense of this data while turning publishers into commodities - yet still aligning incentives by sending them traffic.
Now, with AI, the final bottleneck – creation itself – is being removed, leading to total content commoditization.
In this new landscape, power moves towards community and direct human connection. Content transforms into a "totem pole" - an artifact that brings people together, creating shared experiences and common ground that individualized AI output cannot provide.
Renowned venture capitalist Albert Wenger, the author of The World After Capital, describes humanity’s profound transition into the Knowledge Age.
This new era is shaped by digital technology, which has the power to solve nearly any problem and create copies of information at no extra cost. While historical eras were defined by the scarcity of resources like food and land, today, attention has become the new defining scarcity.
Traditional market mechanisms struggle to effectively allocate this new scarcity for vital human needs, such as finding individual purpose.
To navigate this transition and unlock the full potential of the digital 'knowledge loop'—a cycle of learning, creating, and sharing—Wenger advocates for enhancing economic, informational, and psychological freedoms for all individuals.
This framework emphasizes that for AI and technological progress to truly benefit everyone, innovative social and economic structures like steward ownership are essential for aligning incentives around community well-being and shared purpose.
The shift towards community as the new locus of value deeply resonates with our vision and was covered in our recent podcast episode featuring Nathan Schneider, an expert in democratic design for online life.
Nathan underscores that for online communities to be truly successful and trustworthy, shared ownership and active participation are paramount.
While widespread ownership in digital spaces might seem complex, it's a fundamental driver of accountability and collective creativity.
Crucially, Nathan stresses that participation combined with ownership is what truly unlocks the benefits and vibrancy of any shared endeavor.
This vision of designing for trust, participation, and shared ownership to combat fragmentation is precisely what drives our approach for The Grid by Zolidar.
We recognize that the employee ownership (EO) ecosystem has historically suffered from fragmented, often stale, and expensive-to-maintain information. This hinders its growth and makes it difficult for business owners, advisors, and employees to connect and act with confidence.
We've already built Wikipedia-like collaborative capabilities into The Grid. Members can contribute, edit, and enhance content – from directories of experts and organizations to a knowledge wiki, forum, and market map of employee-ownership.
This creates Wenger’s “knowledge loop” for learning, creating, and sharing, ensuring information stays fresh, accurate, and relevant.
Today, we are excited to publicly announce our long-term vision to evolve The Grid into a Platform Cooperative structure.
This strategic vision aligns incentives directly with the community, fostering an environment where members are motivated to actively participate and contribute. We believe this model will create a self-perpetuating flywheel:
While the technical and legal implementation will require substantial investment and the right partnerships, we've built the foundational collaborative features and are now seeking partners to bring this to life.
This community-curated data is not just about knowledge sharing; it's the critical foundation for powering our AI experience.
Our tools like the Day Zero Guide, Aha Planner, and Zolid AI rely on this rich, evolving dataset to provide personalized, actionable insights, demystifying the EO journey for everyone.
This approach also creates a unique and defensible advantage against generic AI chat applications, allowing us to build a truly specialized and trusted resource for employee ownership that generic LLMs cannot match.
At Zolidar, our mission is to grow the wealth of everyday Americans through employee ownership. By empowering a community that collectively owns and curates its knowledge, we are building the foundational infrastructure to make employee ownership the most obvious path for millions of businesses, truly aligning incentives for a more prosperous and resilient economy.
To realize this vision, we're actively looking to connect with:
If you're interested in supporting this vision or learning more about our approach, we'd love to connect. What are your thoughts on how community ownership can amplify the power of AI in transforming industries?
#EmployeeOwnership #AI #Community #PlatformCooperative #TheGrid #Zolidar #FutureOfWork
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