We’re some number¹ of weeks into this thing, and I owe myself and my fellow fellows a reflection of some kind.

There’s a sense that I had when I was trying to frame my research of topic where I felt “have I been asking myself this question my entire career?”

This feels a little true for all the fellowships: Xavier’s is explicitly self-ethnography. I think what Serena is looking at around community and care is deeply personal: in that her work making space at 1RG by her very presence is such a part of it. I don’t have as strong of an understand of Cheryl’s project yet but it felt very personal and rooted in the self when she described it at our last meeting.

This did lead me to ask myself a silly question: “is all research, when you really come down to it, an act of self-ethnography?”

I think most researchers would answer this with a resounding no, but this style of research where we are in constant communication, sharing reflections and reflecting on each-others reflections leads me to think that maybe this structure does lend itself to deeply personal, self-referential work that includes a great deal of self-ethnography.

So with that out of the way, what is it that I have been grasping for for so many years?

The current question I’m asking myself is

How might we create a sustainable technology company that is controlled by its workers, distributes its returns equitably to them, and can scale?

This leads immediately to three sub-questions:

1. What does sustainable mean?
2. What does it mean to be controlled by the workers?
3. What does equitable mean here?
4. What does “can scale” mean?

I wrote down a sentence and then need to define almost every word in it. Research!!

And in the spirit of all research being auto-ethnography, I should bring this back to myself. I’ve spent almost of all of my career working for small companies that I co-founded. And by small I mean me and a co-founder and maybe sometimes a contractor or two. This is a very high level of autonomy and control: as I often say when you’re a couple of co-founders you de-facto are a worker-owned co-operative. This level of agency has been extremely fulfilling to me in my career, but obviously two co-founders doesn’t really scale. I’d like to find a way to scale that feeling of agency and ownership while tackling problems that require large teams to solve. I’d like everyone that I work with to have that feeling of agency, not just the founding team.

My primary goal is to figure this out. Worker-owned co-operatives are an obvious answer but I don’t want to be dogmatic. And to be honest, even after doing the Platform Coops MOOC I still have so so much to to learn about coops.

My secondary goal is to get better at writing thinking via writing. To that end the fellowship is a great container in which to force myself to write a little bit more. We’ve discussed in our meetings the idea of me doing reflections via vlogs or voice notes, but the real truth is that I’d like to just be able to write more.

What am I going to do?

1. Reading: I’m going to start with Founders at Work to get a sense of what the co-op stage of startups was like
2. Interviews: I have the idea of compiling some interviews with people who have “sustainable” tech companies.
3. Writing: this reflection is hopefully the start of a regular writing practice.

Peer review: https://github.com/1rglabs/summer-fellowship-2024/pull/5