"When you take infinite growth off the table, this entire world of possibilities opens up." — Ramsey Nassar, EMMA Technology Cooperative

We make this show to learn things, ask good questions, and let really cool people shine (and maybe occasionally get a little clever ourselves). This conversation did something different: it reminded us that what we're building isn't just a business model. It can be radical. And maybe it should be.

Ramsey Nassar, Gwen Pasquarello, and Andy Wallace at EMMA Technology Cooperative have spent five years as a worker-owned co-op building software and hardware for video games, theater, public installation, and media arts. And theme parks. And custom programming languages. And a nonprofit arcade collective. They're thriving.

This one gets into:

• Why consensus produces the highest quality decisions at the lowest velocity
• How their compensation model works: flat salary plus a percentage of every invoice cleared, paid out throughout the year as patronage dividends
• How they survived a 10-month dry spell: suspending commissions, recording a debt to members on the books, and plugging away regardless
• The Venn diagram problem: useful and interesting work vs. profitable work
• Also: Emma Goldman (now on our reading list), and the strong case for EMMA jumpsuits

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Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a strategic marketing cooperative. We help small yet mighty teams figure out what actually needs to happen — and then we go do it with them. Most partners bring only thinking or doing. We bring both to your big idea, and we stay until it's shipped.

Find us at http://strangebirds.land

"If they teach you how to build a business, you stop buying their stuff. That's not what they want." — Jessica Lackey

A lot of business advice is a slot machine dressed up as a strategy.

Jessica Lackey's book Leaving the Casino lays it out cold: the entrepreneurial industrial complex isn't, in fact, designed to help you build a sustainable business. It's designed to keep you spending money on the PROMISE of one.

She and Anna get into:

• Why and how the casino targets the most vulnerable entrepreneurs, MLM-style
• The zone of enoughness: how to define your minimum and maximum across money, time, schedule flexibility, and creative autonomy
• Why "just raise your prices" might be the most misplaced advice in the industry, and what to actually do instead
• The difference between slowing down your activity and slowing down your expectations
• Why if your marketing isn't working, it's probably your market, not your mindset

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Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker-owned co-op.

When the opportunity is clear and the doing feels impossible, we get inside your hardest project, find what needs to happen, and follow it all the way through.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land

"Collective care feels like an exhale — like finally being able to breathe at work." – Nilou Khonsari

Most organizations that say they value collective care don't actually build for it. They write values statements, flatten a few org chart lines, and hope the culture follows. (spoiler: it doesn't.)

Nilou Khonsari spent ten years co-building Pangaea Legal Services, a nationally recognized immigrant justice nonprofit, into a model of what collective governance actually looks like in practice. Through her book The Future Is Collective, she helps organizations build structures that truly reflect their values.

Anna and I did a full winter book club around this one.
(We ate it up. I read every word of the appendices.)

This conversation gets into hardcore collective scaffolding:

• The difference between advice process, modified consensus, and consent-based decision making
• What Nilou learned from almost paying her co-founder $1,000 less than herself
• How equal pay worked beautifully at Pangaea for years, until it didn't
• How to redesign a nonprofit board so the people closest to the work are the ones driving it
• Boundaries as a collective practice, not a personal one

And woven throughout: Strange Birds' own messy, ongoing, in-progress attempt to enact a lot of this fun stuff ourselves.

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Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker-owned co-op.

When the opportunity is clear and the doing feels impossible, we get inside your hardest project, find what needs to happen, and follow it all the way through.

Find us at ⁠http://strangebirds.land