That's correct, except (as noted in the Wikipedia article) there are many forms of cooperatives, some of which include customers as owners, and some even allow for external investment.
Common Wealth have done a bit of work on “platform cooperatives”, you can start looking there. My start-up is structured as an employee owned cooperative. We started with a grant which got us to product market fit on a part time basis - and are now “default alive” in our current structure. I should add that we applied to and were rejected by Y Combinator after interview (narrowly a/c the rejection email). At that point I started looking around for other options. After the YC rejection I realised we were not a potential unicorn, although will in all likelihood be profitable. That realisation was incredibly helpful as it spurred me to look into ways that would not depend on fashioning ourselves as a VC casino chip. We can also build the enterprise we want to run, rather than something that appeals to a narrow (but important) class of investors.
Edit: What do you define as “successful”? We are not successful on VC metrics. But we’re happy with what we’ve built and it will make us a bit of money.
It seems like the prime difficulty in getting off the ground with a fully employee-owned entity is the startup losses (especially in cash flow terms) inherent in almost every business have to be borne by the employees.
That’s easier when the losses are small and the absence of salary is easier to take if you do it part-time (the “5 to 9er” lifestyle).
What is your definition of a startup? You can find a well maintained list of tech cooperatives from all over the world at https://github.com/hng/tech-coops.
One of the responses[0] is from someone working at kantree[1].
They are talking about raising funds and building a product, which I assume would somewhat qualify.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 58.6 ms ] threadEdit: What do you define as “successful”? We are not successful on VC metrics. But we’re happy with what we’ve built and it will make us a bit of money.
That’s easier when the losses are small and the absence of salary is easier to take if you do it part-time (the “5 to 9er” lifestyle).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31459041 [1] https://kantree.io