Catalyst Cooperative is an all-remote, 8-person, tech worker cooperative based in North America. The coop was founded in 2017 with the mission to make US energy system data more accessible. Catalyst's main objectives are to curate the free, open-source Public Utilities Data Liberation project (PUDL) and help clients navigate a myriad of energy or environmental data needs.
We filmed this interview to help researchers or coop-curious individuals learn more about what it's like working at a tech cooperative.
Timestamps
0:35 Why did we set up Catalyst as a cooperative?
- 0:49 We needed a container in which to do work
- 1:39 Considering non-profit models
- 3:16 Autonomy
4:09 What are some coop specific barriers that Catalyst has had to overcome to become what it is today? What are some tools for overcoming those barriers?
- 4:16 Access to capital
- 6:30 Explaining what we are to the world
- 7:00 Outsiders understanding who’s in charge
- 7:24 Delegating tasks within a nonhierarchical structure
- 8:12 Transparency and understanding collective finances
- 9:09 Getting to know each other
10:29 - How does non-hierarchy affect our work and how do we handle accountability without a boss?
- 10:41 Consent to be governed
- 10:55 Rotating responsibility based on domain expertise and capacity
- 11:33 Know when it’s necessary to have everyone's input on a decision (and when it is not)
13:22 What have we done to cultivate a consensus building ethos?
- 14:02 Structured check-ins, huddles, and pre-meetings discussions
- 15:26 Who wants to work here in the first place
- 16:38 Conversational impulse control and minimizing meeting time
- 17:46 Clear mission and strategy
- 18:28 Postponing decisions
- 19:17 Talking about things in person
- 20:06 Embracing the fact that decisions take time
- 20:25 Reevaluating decision making structures when it makes sense to do so
23:40 What is the balance between being an owner and employee and how does it impact things like workload and compensation
- 23:58 Different perspective on benefits
- 25:25 Feeling ownership over the work
- 26:27 Flexible unpaid time off
- 28:48 Building organizational redundancy
- 29:20 Ramp up or down organizational capacity
- 30:53 Creative, tax efficient ways to allocate money to members
32:04 How does our definition of success differ from other more traditional organizational structures?
- 32:01 Flexibility is nice, but it can lead to scope creep and surpassing deadlines
- 34:25 Financial check-ins, newsletters, and blog posts
- 34:50 Defining performance metrics
36:25 What is Catalyst’s position toward growth and where do we see ourselves in the future with regard to capacity and number of members?
- 36:46 Finding the sweet spot between needs, impact, and size
- 40:18 Growth begets specialization, for better or worse
- 43:03 Our growth is limited by our weirdness
45:06 How do you know whether working at or starting a coop is right for you?
- 45:25 A healthy dose of skepticism paired with a desire for ownership and flexibility
- 45:58 Willingness to navigate conflict and nuanced decision making
- 46:53 Value autonomy
Transcript
Austen Sharpe: Hello, welcome. My name's Austen. I'm a member of Catalyst Co-op and I'm here with three other members of Catalyst. And today we wanna just share with you some of our insights about what it's like working at a cooperative, why we like it, what some of the challenges are, and demystify some questions folks might have about this very interesting and unique organizational structure. So, without further ado, I'll jump into the first question, which is why we initially decided to set up Catalyst as a cooperative.
Zane Selvans: Well I guess that's for Christina and I, since we were there. We really just needed a container in which to do work. We had both been working at a little nonprofit, a 501c3 in Colorado, and the opportunity to do some more data-oriented work came along. And that nonprofit wasn't interested, really, in taking that direction. So we decided we needed to have a vehicle for doing that work.
I think we'd both just done a lot of other kinds of co-op development - like housing co-ops, food co-ops - and it seemed like a natural container. We want a company that employs us to do some work, and of course, we would make a worker co-op. I don't know, it seemed a natural extension of other cooperative development work that we had done. But what do you think, Christina?
Christina Gosnell: I'll just add I think that the the non-profit model felt good - it's where we came from - which felt good in a lot of ways, and we were tying to build an open public resource, so we definitely thought about doing this work in a non- profit model. And I think that the possibility of forever being reliant on durable giving and philanthropy didn't feel super appealing to us. I also think that it felt exciting to be able to - while doing a mission-driven thing - have a little bit more autonomy over our day-to-day decision-making and work processes.
So for us, the decision was like, should we go with a nonprofit or should we go with- at least for me it was the nonprofit versus a worker co-op. For a lot of us, I don't think it really crossed our minds to make a standard business, in large part because we wanted to make sure our future selves were going to be good curators of this tool, and good curator of the mission, and the project that we were about to work on. And we wanted make sure that our future collaborators, which we hoped to have, would have the same amount of say, and autonomy, and responsibility, and ownership of the project.
Zane Selvans: I think a lot of it came down to the autonomy. If we were a non-profit, there would be a board, and that board would be largely external people who are not engaged in the day-to-day operation of the organization, the business. But as a co-op, we the employees are the board, for the time being while we're small. And having that kind of self-control was definitely attractive. We thought about the worker nonprofit or the worker-directed nonprofit organization model that Janelle Orsi has tried to popularize. But in the end, just having a worker-owned business seemed like the most well-aligned with our goals and our experiences with democratic governance and other small organizations.
Austen Sharpe: I think we can jump into the next one, then. What are some co-op specific barriers that Catalyst has had to overcome to become what it is today?
Christina Gosnell: A thing that I don't think of often as a barrier - but I hear it from a lot of other worker co-ops - is that access to capital is hard. Especially when starting up, access to capital is hard. And in an ongoing way, it can be quite challenging. For us, I think that when we were starting out, because we're not building a thing and then expecting to become super profitable, and be able to pay off either a bunch of loans or venture capital type investments in our business - that was never a part of our imagination and therefore it hasn't really been a barrier because we haven't tried to access it. But it certainly would be if we went down that path, just because of some of the structural setups of worker co-ops. So because we didn't imagine that or want to go down that path, it kind of wasn't a barrier, or hasn't been a barrier.
But I feel like that's the first thing I think of when I think about a barrier for starting and sustaining worker coops - if we needed to build anything physical in the world or invest some upfront capital, I don't know if this would be a much more challenging model.
Zane Selvans: Yeah, and we kind of sidestepped that by: one, not trying to create a proprietary good. We are trying to public goods, public informational goods, public interest technology. And that meant that we had access to grant funding, which has been able to play a lot of the role that I think that kind of startup capital would play in other kinds of businesses. So it let us build a basic proof of concept and get something that was useful up and running initially. And because the only inputs really are our time and effort - our labor - that worked pretty well. I think it hasn't really been a barrier, but maybe a source of friction that has come up occasionally is just explaining to the rest of the world what we are.
People will often assume that we're a 501c3 non-profit because of the kind of work that we are doing. And we have to like explain, "Well, no, we're not really. We're actually, technically, a for-profit business." And then for-profit business has all of these other connotations that are also not quite correct for us. So we're like a low-profit business. And I mean, I think we also struggle sometimes with our outside collaborators having a hard time understanding who's in charge and defaulting to Christina and I, probably just because we've been around for the longest. Maybe not always understanding, "Well, we need to go talk to the other members and see whether this is something we want to do or not."
Katie Lamb: In a similar vein, I think the non-hierarchical structure is mostly a blessing, but at times it can feel bad to delegate the less desirable tasks to someone, or certain people feel like they're taking on more of the burden at different times. And making sure that that workload evens out, and that everybody does a mix of the tasks that they're good at, and they really want to do, and the less desirable tasks that nobody wants to do. So just generally not having a standard project management structure, or standard HR department, or the things that you would find at a normal workplace can be tricky sometimes. It's just an adjustment.
Christina Gosnell: One extra thing that I think makes distributed decision-making work is transparency. One of my hobby horses in Catalyst has just been to make sure that we all understand our collective finances, and we understand how our decisions about where we work, what we focus on, and what projects we take on, affect our collective resources. And... Yeah, we need it.
We both need a degree of ongoing understanding of the month-to-month and day-to day decisions, and also I feel like I've had to learn a lot about what standard financing, bookkeeping, and general business reporting means, and attempt to share out that information amongst us, so we're all making good collective decisions together.
Austen Sharpe: That actually reminds me of one tool for overcoming a barrier that we're really good at, and I think is really unique to the co-op structure. Really getting to know each other on a more human level, and understanding what each of us cares about, where we're plugged-in in the organization, and how we can empathize with one another, consider their perspectives or consider like, this person likes to verbally process, or this person likes to write things down, or this person likes, I don't know, afternoon meetings or something like that, just so that we can come together at a place where everyone feels comfortable and like they've had the opportunity to weigh in, in a way that is most effective for them - and I think that goes a long way in terms of decision making, and consensus building, and things like that.
Awesome. The next question, which is more focused on the hierarchy aspect - and I want to clarify too, at the beginning, that non-hierarchy isn't implicit for cooperatives. That is how we've decided to structure ourselves. So if one of you guys wants to touch on that - the decision to start in a non-hierarchical place - whether that's common for cooperatives, what type of hierarchy you might find in other cooperatives, and then we can jump into the question of how hierarchy affects our work in practice, and how we work around things like accountability when we don't have a boss.
Zane Selvans: I think there's an element of consent to be governed in this. It's not like different people don't have different amounts of responsibility in different tasks, different domains that we're working in. But it's about managing, like, "Okay, well, who is familiar with this technology that we're using? Maybe they should have more responsibility for coming up with a reasonable design." Or who is more familiar with this foundation or this grant domain that we're applying for? So who has more responsibility kind of rotates around, depending on the domain and who has capacity to work on things at any given time. So it's not like everybody has equal input into every single decision and every single activity that we take.
And I do think that we have learned over time about when it's important to get everybody's sign off on something. In particular, this last year we got quite a long ways down writing a significant grant, just within the grant development team - with a lot of direction from the foundation that we were applying to - and by the time the proposal came to the whole organization, the whole co-op, you're like, "Hey, we're about to do this thing." It was kind of too late to either say no, or to dramatically change direction, and we got some feedback that it would have been good to know earlier what the hell we were planning to do.
So now, before we put in a bunch of hours to write a grant, or really come to some understanding with the organization or the foundation that we're trying to get money from, we now come back to an all-team meeting, the PUDL huddle, and ask, "Here's what we're planning to do, here's an outline in bulletized form. Does this seem like a thing that we should do as an organization?" Because yeah, we're dedicating hundreds or potentially thousands of hours of our time to doing this thing.
And especially with grants, typically, the overhead does not totally cover all of the organizational costs of existing. So it's good to have agreement "Yeah, we're going to expend a little bit of organizational surplus, some profit that comes from client work, to make sure that this grant work can be completed and everybody needs to be on board with thinking that that's a productive use of our time and energy.
Austen Sharpe: Absolutely. Well, cool. In a similar vein, I'm curious with the non-hierarchy, a question that I get often is, how do you make decisions? What happens if there's a clash of opinions, and how do you move forward if there is not one definitive voice saying this is the way? And my answer to that is often, "We're actually really good at consensus here at Catalyst." And, you know, I don't think we're particularly special, and so my question is what have we done about our culture to cultivate this sort of consensus-building ethos, and how have we been able to be so successful at it? And in times when we haven't been as successful, what have we done to work around that?
Christina Gosnell: Just process-wise, some of the things that we do is that we have two standing meetings, both for our full team, which often overlaps exactly with our board - which right now is all of our members - and sometimes we cancel those meetings because there's no agenda items. But you have to put an agenda item on the, in a document beforehand, and in a structure that we all know and are familiar with, and with a time, and a description, and a place for pre-meeting discussion. We really ask that people put those agenda items on 24 hours before the meeting and there's this place for a pre- meeting discussion. And that gets through a lot of the- not everyone super engages in pre-meeting discussion, but that does get through a lot of the early gunk. Not gunk, but it sifts through the questions that are gonna come up in real time, and then we're able to kind of cut right to the places in our meetings that really need the most work in order to get to a place of consensus. That's the structural. Just two of the kind of boring, just process things I think have really helped us.
Zane Selvans: I think one thing that helps us reach consensus relatively easily is there's a pretty strong filter on who becomes a member. You need to be pretty on board with the mission of the organization to become a member, partly because we're offering an unusual compensation package that not everybody is going to enthusiastic about. So we pay significantly lower wages than probably you would have historically been able to get for doing the same kind of work. And we offer a lot more kind of flexibility and autonomy. And also you get to work on open source, open data, climate-focused work.
So the people who have signed up to be part of Catalyst, we've all already agreed at a high level on some mission orientation and shared values, which makes this much easier than if it was just a random collection of technical people that have been dropped into a business together, and had to make a bunch of decisions together.
Katie Lamb: I think it starts from joining and seeing that there are times when it's not necessary to chime in, or it's not necessary to have a super-opinionated take on a decision that is actually relatively minor, because it can feel like some decisions are make-or-break and then if we actually zoom out at the co-op it's pretty inconsequential. So just recognizing when something really matters, versus when potentially looping on one decision could lead to infinite meeting time. And I think as a co-op, we're pretty good at being wary of infinite meeting times, especially being fully remote. It's pretty draining to be on the phone all day and just feeling like we have a lot of actual work that we could be getting done. And I feel like that priority of minimizing synchronous call time has been helpful for quickly reaching a consensus at times.
Christina Gosnell: Yes, to all of that. I also think that, similar to what y'all are saying, that having a clear- abeit sometimes vague - we have a clear mission that has the particularities of the strategy, and how we implement the vision is often something that we need to rework and redesign on and all the things, but having a clear "We're trying to do this thing, we know what it is, there's many different directions we go in, but it would kind of have a clear focus. It's easy to say, "Is this going to help our clear mission or not? Or is this a distraction or not?" So for me, I think that helps a lot in our decision making process.
Sometimes we when we do disagree. And it's hard to make decisions without eating a lot of meeting time - working through that with a lot meeting time - we have just delayed decisions, which sometimes can feel annoying, certainly. It can be both frustrating just to know that there's this decision that we're trying to make, that's out there, that we kind of have hanging over us.
And also, when there are a variety of opinions that are strong about a thing that feels core, or not a piddly little thing, we often just give it time. And the last big decision that I think we truly didn't know how we were gonna come to a consensus around, we have an annual retreat and we saved it for that. And we talked about it in person and it was really nice. One of our members facilitated us through that process. And I think we came to a good place and got all of our- it was really nice.
We started with hopes and also fears, and we were able to see did we get through the hopes and did we mitigate the fears in making this decision? And we were able to move forward with a degree of clarity around a decision that was hard for us to make. So it had a bunch of trade-offs. So yeah, sometimes this model does indeed take more time to get to a clear decision, but I think we made a much better decision than if just Ayersine[sp?], who started Catalyst, were able to just make it. I think we made a much better decision with everybody's input.
Austen Sharpe: One other thing I think is unique to Catalyst, potentially the co-op structure, is we have the ability to constantly redefine ourselves, or backtrack and change decisions and reevaluate processes that we have in place. So we build a structure that works for ourselves, but then we have power basically, at any given point, to say this is no longer working for us. Not just look at the decisions we're making, but the structure in which we're making those decisions and try and make it incrementally better and better. And so I think that relieves some of the pressure as well when you're trying to make a really tough decision to say, "this is gonna be final, final, final version; definitive, yes; finally sending this." There's always space to circle back and say, is this working for us or not?
And that's another thing we've implemented as a team, is these retrospective meetings, where we'll come together and talk about either a project that we're working on, or a meeting we had or something, and we can go over what's worked, what hasn't worked. We have project management check-ins where we share how we've wrangled each other, what's work, what haven't worked, and that constant ability to be improving Catalyst is really helpful in terms of, I think, building consensus and feeling like we're building an organization that we all are supportive of, and proud of, and feel like is reaching for something continually better and reinventing itself as necessary.
Zane Selvans: I will say this can also spiral sometimes. You know, having the ability to constantly change things doesn't mean it's necessarily good to be constantly changing things. And I think we have struggled sometimes with adopting a new decision-making or project management structure. And then there's always some friction in changing patterns of behavior and planning, and we need to stick with a decision for long enough to get to where it feels like the new normal to really evaluate whether it's better or worse, or what its strengths and weaknesses are.
And I think especially early on, we would occasionally get caught in this kind of churn of process change and experimentation where we never really got to where something felt familiar enough to be able to iterate on it again. And I've think we've gotten better at that over time, being like, "Look, we're gonna let this go for an entire quarter or two quarters, or a year even, and then we're going to talk about whether it worked or or not." And this is, I think, a pretty common co-op problem that the you can get just mired in process and decision making, and it's just good to be aware of that and exercise the autonomy in a judicious way and not just for the sake of exercising it because you can.
Austen Sharpe: Awesome. Well that's pretty relevant, I think, to the next question, which is about the balance between being both an owner and an employee, and how that affects our decision-makings around things like workload and compensation, among other things.
Katie Lamb: I can go first, as the most recent convert from being an employee to an owner. I think, yeah, it is a little bit of a transition for newer members. In particular, normal benefits that you would associate with being an employee, that your employer would provide. The biggest shift is realizing that you are providing those benefits to yourself at your own cost. So, for example, we've looked at corporate health insurance plans and done the math and realized that actually, as owners of the co-op it's less beneficial to us than as in our employee role. And the same is true of a lot of tax decisions and a lot of those standard things that we associate with the responsibility of an owner in American companies.
And that can feel like a bummer because I think you see more immediate payoff as an employee than you do as an owner. For example wages: you feel you feel mostly like an employee in your day-to-day and then there's moments when I feel like an owner from the financial perspective, like when we do our profit sharing, I'm like, "Okay, this is my owner responsibility." But then also, the feeling of having ownership of the work and being able to really change the direction of the co-op if I want, or the direction of a project, feels a lot more like the owner role. And I think it's really easy in work to feel no ownership over your work if the decision is coming from the top down, so it's pretty cool to actually feel responsibility over work, and feel like the direction that I take my work will have actual payoff for me and that it's something that I value. So I think the owner benefits and role is a little bit more nebulous and intangible than the employee role and oftentimes they feel pretty distinct but I think that the owner payoff is what really makes the co-op structure unique and special.
Christina Gosnell: I think for us, one of the things that is unique about how we structured our benefits that I think would only have happened if we sat on both sides of this, the employee versus employer fence, is that we have pretty, I think, truly pretty flexible unpaid time off. You know, I really value that a lot. I think I think we've attracted a lot of people that really value that. We have a minimum threshold amount of work that you need to do in a year, an amount of hours you need put it in a year. And you can take pretty long chunks of time off, which is both challenging for the co-op at times when, if I am the sole person on a job that is on-going, if I leave that means I need to do a bunch of knowledge transfer, and make sure that's covered, and blah blah blah. So it can be challenging.
But also, from a wage perspective it's effectively free for the co-op to provide. So from the employee - your perspective - it's like, "yeah, of course, take time off as long as you get the responsibilities covered, and you have enough engagement in the coop over the medium to long run that it works well." Yeah, I think that's an example of something that we've done that's creative because it really doesn't cost the co op anything except for coordination, and honestly I think has done us really well in terms of when someone takes a good chunk of time off, it helps us increase redundancy in our work. And I thinking it helps with making the co-op as a whole much more resilient to bumps in the roads and also just- I really value it, and I think people often come back happier and more excited to be a human and therefore usually better at their job. So I think that that is an example of us playing both roles and being creative about it.
Zane Selvans: Yeah, it is annoying sometimes to be, "Oh, this person is going to be gone for a month, we need to download whatever specific knowledge they have, or figure out who else needs to be an administrator on such and such account." But it's definitely beneficial to the organization to have little bite-sized chunks of people disappearing, so that you're not surprised after someone leaves after four years, you're like, "Oh, wow, they had the keys to all of these different things that we have to get done. And now none of us have any idea how to do those things.".
I think something we haven't really exercised much, but that this structure allows us to do, is if there's a time when there's a lot more work that we need to get done, the fact that people are working on average, maybe 25 hours a week, there's spare capacity there in theory, that you can be like, "Look, this month we have a bunch of deadlines that happen to have stacked up, we need people to work more hours." And you can work more without working 50 hours a week, or 60 hours a week, which is extremely unpleasant for a lot of people.
And then also, if we were to go through a lean time when we're waiting for new contracts or waiting to hear back in our grant, we also have the possibility of ramping down and being like, "Who would like to take a skiing vacation or go on a bike trip, or something to reduce the burn rate through our resources on hand?".
Those are both things that if it was a pure employer-employee relationship would feel definitely less comfortable to me, to be like, "We'd like you to work less now or we'd like you to work more than you're used to working now." But as an owner, you see, OK, no, we really do need to either ramp up or ramp down because of external circumstances. And it's one of the tools in our toolbox for dealing with the challenges of being a small business with irregular work.
Christina Gosnell: Yeah, I think another decision that we've made a few times now - that I think reflect all of us sitting on both sides of this; sharing, having multiple roles in this process - is that the last few times that we have given ourselves raises or cost of living adjustments, we've almost entirely - I think actually entirely for the last two years - put those into increases in employer contributions to our retirement accounts, because that's what we all wanted and it's very tax advantage. That's what we all wanted and we could decide to do that, and that and it's fun to be able to check in with everybody on all those kinds of policies and see can we financially make this decision in a way that is good for the co-op, that helps enable us to continue to be employed, and help stable work and all the things, and also benefit us as individuals.
Austen Sharpe: All right, the next question I want to jump into is about success and how we define success as a group, and how that might differ from other more traditional organizational structures.
Katie Lamb: I think this is actually maybe one of the things we struggle most at. I think on zooming in on a granular level, we can have classic deliverables for a project or success criteria, and we do try to define that at the start of a client project, or a grant or something. And then, I think due to in part a lack of hierarchy and project management, it can feel like it's very easy to have kind of scope creep, or for a project to be out of budget, or or for us to redefine our success criteria. And in some ways it's nice to be flexible in that way, but in other ways, projects can just drag on a lot longer than we thought, or it can feel like we didn't accomplish what we set out to.
And that's probably true if you do have a project manager, and that kind of change in success criteria, probably it's more frustrating if you don't have transparency into why it's changing. So I do think it's cool that we can pivot, or that more opinions can be introduced and we can rethink, but I do often think that we struggle with defining success.
On an organizational level, I do think a lot of our decisions are mission-driven and it comes back to like, does this align with our mission? That being said, it's hard to adjust our theory of change, or how we think we're gonna make impact in our field, without getting together in person to talk about it. And so I think we're actually less flexible in defining success on an organizational level. And it's hard to zoom out and try to see if we are successful. I think there's tangible ways that we measure success, like financial check-ins, or even newsletters and blog posts about the work that we have completed. So getting those nuggets of the feeling, like we're doing real successful work, is really helpful when a lot of the times there's swirling priorities.
Zane Selvans: I think in the financial domain we - multiple years ago, at this point - defined some performance indicators where, "This is the metric we're going to track. And this is the level at which we think it's acceptable versus unacceptable." And I think that's really, it's been clarifying to know, "Yes, we have enough money committed that we will be able to pay ourselves for the next year, even if we didn't bring in any additional grants or find any other large contracts. We've struggled to come up with similarly concrete and well-tracked metrics as far as impact.
I know, obviously, one of the main points here is to keep us employed, doing work that we feel is meaningful and learning useful things. And I think thus far, we've done well with that. We've never had to lay people off, and we have been able to have at least a year's worth of runway for, for paying ourselves for quite a while now. Which is, especially lately, more stability than a lot of - certainly small - tech companies have had. Which is great, but I think we need to come up with something analogous for our impact, like looking at usage metrics, who is using the data, what are they using it for, what are their frustrations, are we addressing their frustations. So we have an ongoing project right now, funded by the, the NSF grant to get better at interpreting and analyzing those numbers internally so that we can have something similar.
Austen Sharpe: This question is about growth and scaling. Essentially curious what Catalyst's position towards growth and scale has been in the last couple of years. Has that changed over time, and where do we see ourselves moving in the future in terms of organizational capacity and number of members?
Christina Gosnell: I can try to take a first stab at this one. This is the thing that we've talked about on and off since our since we started, really. And I think often what it comes down to is, is there a sweet spot for meeting our needs in terms of our size? So our needs often are, what do we want to get done so we have this kind of impact? And what do we want in terms of stability, and some financial security and redundancy on our team? And what do you want socially and organizationally; how do you want work to feel? And there's tension in different sizes for all of those desires and needs.
Like for me personally, I think the size that we're at right now is really a sweet spot where I feel like I can know everyone. There's a little bit of distinguishing of roles and responsibilities, but we're not so large that we need more hierarchy. I think we can manage ourselves at this size without a degree of hierarchy. I think if we grew a lot, we would need a change.
We've also talked about in the past about the rate of change. There were a few years where we were hiring one or two people a year, and for us that was a lot. And we had do that thing that Zane was mentioning before, of constantly readapting our processes in order to accommodate for more folks, and never really settling into a process, a way of how we were moving together, and we never really settling into our formation because our formation was constantly changing. And that was kind of a challenge in a way.
But we have often talked about growth and been, I think, collectively excited about it in the context of imagining a type of project or imagining a kind of work that we would build into, or move into, that we believed in its impact. It seems like for us, there's some degree of reluctancy to grow, but a willingness to do it if it's going to enable us to make a bigger impact in our work. And some projects we just couldn't take on sustainably if we don't grow. So yeah, there's a lot of tension there.
And I think it's from - this is another place where like being the employee and the employer - I think is quite helpful where we can say like, "I like working at this size. For me, this is ideal, but I know that organizationally it'll benefit us to grow a little bit and, therefore I'm willing to sacrifice a little bit of my personal desire around our size for the entity." And yeah, just a lot of trade-offs there. We're certainly not in a growth-for-growth's-sake kind of work, which I really deeply appreciate.
Zane Selvans: At some point earlier in this conversation, we talked about the consensus-building process, and at this size of eight or 10 people, everybody has some level of knowledge of all of the other people, some kind of one-on-one relationship, because you've worked on a project together or whatever. And I think at 20 people - if you were twice our size - that starts to break down. You would have some people that you had a real working relationship with, and other people that maybe you are acquainted with but don't have a lot of personal connection with. And that would be different from a kind of decision making and organizational management point of view.
I think in our bylaws, we have a provision that if we reach 11 members, we'll elect a board of five members, because organizational decision making, as you get more and more people trying to come to consensus, it does become more challenging - potentially more time consuming. But at the same time, I personally, think that we would probably benefit from some amount of additional specialization internally. Like right now, we all have a lot of overlap in our skills and technical experience, and there are other things that it would be good for the organization to be able to do, like web front end development or data visualization, or somebody who's really into doing the administrative work, or dedicated to doing grant writing. So I could definitely see growing somewhat.
I could imagine us being a company of 20 people - because I think at that level you still don't need a lot of the institutionalized bureaucracy - but we would be able to have substantially more skills, diversity and specialization within the organization that would let us take on more diverse and larger tasks as a company. And I think that would probably be good for us, but it is more mouths to feed, right? You would need like a much higher, potentially twice the flux of money coming through the organization. And yeah, it would be different.
So I think for me personally, I am more interested in staying about this size, but maybe gradually specializing internally a little bit more to see how that feels organizationally. And if it feels good, then maybe growing into having a little bit more differentiation of responsibilities within the org.
Katie Lamb: Yeah, I think kind of in that vein, it also feels like there is a kind of hump that we could surpass, where if we took a risk and grew a little there's benefits that we can afford ourselves, like paying ourselves more because we would probably be more profitable. And one aspect of growth that's kind of interesting to me is that it feels like everybody in our little organization is, on an individual level, in a similar place in life and has similar life priorities. And I think if one of us wanted to have a kid or another major life changer, we would have to respect someone who felt like they needed to make a lot more money than we do currently, or someone who felt like they needed to work full-time hours and... Be treated more like a senior software engineer or something.
And so we've been somewhat lucky to all agree on our life priorities and feeling like we don't need growth in our lifestyles. But it also means that we have a harder time, I think, attracting a diversity of new hires - like diversity in a traditional sense - but also it feels like we aren't fully capable of hiring someone with a deep tech background who really might be able to help our technical infrastructure, or someone who has a ton of project management experience or something. So it does limit our hiring capacity, I think, and we inherently have to attract people who have similar lifestyle values that we do right now, which is both a strength and a weakness, I think.
Austen Sharpe: Okay, awesome. The last question I want to pose - and maybe we can just do kind of a quick round robin - is how do you know whether working at a co-op is right for you as an individual? Whether you're thinking of starting a coop or joining a co op, what are the characteristics you think it takes in a human being to thrive in this kind of environment?
Katie Lamb: I'll start. As someone who was never in a housing co-op, or food co-ops or anything and just sort of stumbled upon the co-op landscape, I think a general skepticism of standard corporate structure and the feeling of wanting some ownership over your work, and wanting ownership over your work-life balance, and feeling a high level of flexibility is a priority.
Christina Gosnell: Yes to that. And also I will add a willingness to navigate conflict and nuanced decision-making with other people. You're not always gonna super, super love either the people or the decisions that other people wanna make, and figuring out how to show up as a kind human in those decisions, and also sit through some conflict at times, which will happen. And no one is going to come down from on high and say, this is the right way to move, or stop doing that. A willingness to navigate the complexities of humans.
Zane Selvans: I think you really need to value autonomy. You know, if you just want to be told what to do, and not have to like feel too responsible for it, and turn the crank and do your job, then this is probably not going to offer a lot of benefits to you as an employee/owner. But if that's something that you feel like you've been frustrated with at other jobs where you want to have more of a say and the ability to participate in decisions, and you have strong ideas about how things could be better, then this structure where you're very explicitly empowered, and you really need to be involved in that kind of decision-making and priority-setting process, then that offers potentially a real benefit to you as a member.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
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