“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.
We get 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
ACTION ITEMS:
- If your business only had access to one verb to measure whether it’s working, what would you want that verb to be?
- Where in your work are you defaulting to speed when you could be defaulting to quality?
- When did you last feel genuinely radicalized by something, like your sense of what’s possible actually shifted?
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Strange Birds is a worker-owned cooperative of strategic messaging partners. 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.
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Listen anywhere podcasts roost (except Spotify).
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/D3RgYmKLJ78
Learn more about EMMA Technology Cooperative: https://emma.coop/
Read the EMMA blog: https://blog.emma.coop/
Follow Andy, Gwen, and Ramsey on LinkedIn
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Read the raw transcript:
[00:00:13] Anna: Welcome to Flying the Coop. We are Anna and Janel of Strange Birds, a worker owned co op. We believe the structure of how you build something determines what it can grow into.
[00:00:25] Janel: Flying the Coop is for the people in the rooms where big things get built and who love thinking more deeply about how that work happens. Today we are interviewing the fine folks at EMMA Technology Cooperative, a worker owned creative technology co op based in New York City.
EMMA builds software and hardware for clients in video games, theater, public installation and media arts. They have tackled theme park installations, programming languages built from scratch, politically challenging web art, a non profit arcade collective, and more game design than you can shake a joystick at.
Five years into it, this crew’s got some super interesting and practical approaches to the big questions, like how to pay people fairly when the market doesn’t, how to make decisions when everyone has an equal vote, and how to build something small on purpose to make it last.
[00:01:12] Anna: Hi, EMMA.
Interestingly, none of you are actually named Emma. Would you mind introducing yourselves and in a sentence or two, what you do at Emma?
[00:01:23] Gwen: My name is Gwen.a I’m one of the founding members with Ramsey and Andy. We all write software. We all write slightly different software. I tend to be a little more focused on like hardware and installations and that kind of work. Not that they don’t do it. That’s I think, the thing I do the most of.
And yeah, the theme park was me. I guess that’s a good description of which part of Emma I am.
[00:01:45] Andy: I’m Andy Wallace. Yeah. Creative coder and game designer at emma. Yeah. It’s funny to think about what do we each do at Emma because we all do a bit of everything.
I’m probably the gamiest member of EMMA in terms of the stuff I work on.
Like I’m a part of that arcade nonprofit you mentioned earlier.
[00:02:05] Ramsey: I’m Ramsey, another one of the founding members of emma, also run the co op equally with Gwen and Andy. We all did the unglamorous work of bookkeeping, accounting, co op administration and I also write software. And yeah, I guess in that laundry list of the things that Emma does, the programming languages, that’s me.
Among other things.
[00:02:29] Anna: I’m smiling big at this because it sounds like you all function a lot how we function over here at Strange Birds. So let’s go back. I think it’s been five years since you became a co op. What made you decide to go down that route? Because especially in the United States, that’s not a common choice.
[00:02:48] Gwen: It’s a pain in the ass. I think this is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. This was originally Ramsey’s sort of. I think he was the initiator of this project. But we all came out of freelancing and wanted something a little better than freelancing. And I think that’s eventually led us to the decision of starting a co op. I’ll let Rance and Andy speak to it too.
[00:03:08] Ramsey: Yeah. I had been freelancing for almost a decade, and I know all of us had a similar kind of work where you’re basically engaged with a client for a period of time to turn around a project and then you move on to the next client. And I think for me, like, that kind of work is ideal. Like, I love contracting. I love the high turnover of projects. I love getting to meet new people and new clients. And I just wanted a version of that with, like, none of the downsides. That’s what led me to the co op. The loneliness of being a solitary freelancer sucked, and I wanted a crew. Basically. The financials are pretty, like, wrecked. You’re either making money or losing money as a freelancer. And I wanted to be in a situation where I could be in between gigs and still making money somehow.
And those are all sort of practical considerations. But, yeah, I reached a point just looking around and the way the world and the economy is, and I think we all have a similar feeling that we don’t want, like, a boss, but we also don’t want to be anyone else’s boss. And that those are like, that’s actually the same idea.
And the way to get everything that we want is to really double down on that.
[00:04:19] Andy: Yeah. I think Ramsey really nailed it. But having that sense of community, having that sense of making freelance a little bit more predictable as opposed to just like, boom and bust.
And then, yeah, I wanted to be a company where I didn’t hate my boss.
[00:04:35] Janel: We’ve had so many of these same conversations before. I think when I was at the point of potentially hopping on strange boards, we were still in that maybe I will, maybe I won’t phase. I remember you, Ana, mentioning that you wanted to join forces with somebody, but you didn’t want to ever manage somebody. And that really struck home with me because the one time I was forced into managing people, oh, God, is that a mess. I’m sure there are people who are great at it, love it, vibe with it. That’s not me, and I guess it’s not you, and it’s maybe not anyone who is present. Yeah. So I feel you on that. So I’m. I’m very curious because Your structure is super intentional and right now you are three. But in the like call that we had prior to this conversation, you mentioned that you’d cap probably around 8. Can you tell me about being very intentional about that kind of size? What does that mean for how you want to exist in the world as a business?
[00:05:25] Andy: Yeah, I think the number one thing about that is it’s very important to us in terms of our decision making structure to reach consensus.
So we don’t vote on things and just say, you gotta vote it. So this is what we’re doing.
We sit down and talk about the actions we’re going to do. And that doesn’t mean everyone 100% agrees all the time, but that there is a consensus reach.
There’s just a hard limit on that. Like you can’t do that with 200 people.
And we don’t want to.
[00:05:54] Anna: That’s our model too. I don’t know what consensus model you use, but we use very Quaker style consensus.
And I found that while we were working on building our operating agreement.
The pure consensus model is also not common in co ops. It’s usually one person, one vote.
So with the size cap and with the consensus model, can you talk a little bit more about how decisions are made and work within Emma?
[00:06:20] Ramsey: Yeah, it’s funny that you say Quaker style consensus. Like we’ve talked to other people who have a modified consensus and there’s these like really formal sort of structures. We’re much more. I don’t know that we have a. I couldn’t tell you what sort of school of thought or consensus comes from. We mostly just talk it out and respect each other and hold space for each other and are really committed, I think, to modifying a proposal to meet other people’s needs rather than pushing anything through. So yeah, I think we are very deliberate about consensus. But yeah, I don’t know that we have sort of a theory of consensus that we enact beyond just doing our best.
[00:06:58] Gwen: Yeah, I think. And the other thing is that we just keep working on it until we do find something that makes everybody at least tolerate it. And usually that ends up leading to the best decision. Like just going through that process of, nope, we gotta find something everybody’s okay with. And eventually once you find that, yeah, that ends up being the right thing to do. Like the obviously correct thing. Like in hindsight it’s like, obviously that was what we needed to do the whole time. We just had to find it.
But again, like this sort of loose, we’re just gonna talk about it and work on it till we find it. You can’t do that with 200 people. That’s gonna fall apart in like four seconds. So, you know, I think there’s just not a willingness to try and do that gymnastics. Like it’s the thing everybody wants to like, gotcha. It’s what happens if there’s 100 people. It’s.
[00:07:42] Andy: I don’t know.
[00:07:43] Gwen: That’s not what I’m doing. Like I am in fact unobligated to run a 200 person business. No one can make me.
[00:07:51] Andy: Yeah.
[00:07:51] Ramsey: And one of our founding members. So we were four at founding, at three Currently one of our founding members departed I think two years ago on good terms for personal reasons. And his name is Ivan Safran. He’s an amazing game developer and graphics programmer. He actually pushed us for.
He insisted on consensus, which I really appreciate because yeah, coming in I had in my mind I’m like, oh, it’s the one person, one vote majority wins. And he said a few things about consensus that have really stayed with me. One is that his experience was like having lived in communal housing, like semi, not quite squats, but like him and a bunch of friends would move into a mansion in like somewhere in Brooklyn and live together and cook for each other and split rent. Those houses were all managed by consensus and they were, I think the biggest one was 27 people.
And his, his take on it was that consensus produces the highest quality decisions at the lowest velocity, which as an engineer I really appreciate framing it as a trade off. And there are situations where you need to produce decisions at a velocity that necessitates making lower quality decisions. So you don’t do consensus. So strictly you have to be a real computer scientist about it. Give it 200 people. The highest quality decision would probably be to consult every single one of them and to factor everything in. And that’ll maybe take two years. Right.
So if you don’t have that much time, you do delegation or you do majority voting, you do other things that are going to produce decisions that are not as high quality but in a timeframe that is more realistic. So yeah, Emma is very, we’re very committed to our kind of consensus and we don’t want to scale such that we would have to change because there are other models that can work for a 200 person co op. There are co ops of thousands of people that function fine, but they don’t function by consensus. So that trade off is something I think that we’re really mindful of.
[00:09:44] Anna: I’m sitting here listening to you all speak. I’m like, are we just like we do messaging in UX and you all do development, but we’re like actually the same people.
[00:09:54] Janel: I also just really appreciate putting it in terms of asking, what’s your metric? What are you optimizing for? And then depending on what system you’re in, what kind of result are you going to get optimizing for that? It depends what you’re measuring. Right. And if you’re measuring quality of result, which maybe ought to be if you’re building intentionally and not just speed, I don’t mistake motion for progress, all that. Yeah, I’m absolutely going to steal your framing because it’s a way of.
When I bring up the way that we do consensus based decision making, I get a lot of blank stares sometimes and from people who just think faster is automatically better. And how do you even do anything at all if you all have to agree on it? And the answer is you go slower. It’s true, you go slower in your right. And that’s not a defect, at least not for us.
[00:10:39] Ramsey: And you don’t even need to look too like there have been anarchist societies that have been governed like this. But you don’t need to go too far into like radical politics to find this kind of decision making. The ietf, which is a technical body that produces basically like protocols and like technical recommendations, I’m pretty sure it’s the ietf, they make decisions by consensus. And they’re not like a radical left. They’re just like, no, this produces high quality decisions.
There’s not another way to do it. And they’re playing on a much harder mode than we are. We’re like three people who like trust each other. The it like this is a board of engineers that are like drifting in and drifting out and have different levels of commitment and different levels of engagement with the subject matter.
[00:11:20] Gwen: So work for direct competitors. Like they like there are engineers from both Google and Microsoft on this board, right. And they don’t, they’re not actually on
[00:11:28] Ramsey: the same side, but no, and it’s all, it’s, it’s rough consensus and they’re like, they have a declaration of it that like it does border on no gods, no masters. They’re like, we don’t believe in presidents or kings or something like that. I’m like, yeah, okay, you don’t have to wave the flag, but you’re doing the thing. That’s dope. But yeah, there’s a sense of this kind of like way of organizing is both.
I think, we think more Moral and more ethical, but also just more practical and just more, like, effective.
[00:11:57] Andy: Yeah. And there’s a lot of instances of this, too, outside of business. Yeah. Like, it gets blank stares sometimes. You’re like, oh, this is how we run a company. But, like, when people go out with their friends, they don’t usually, like, vote on the restaurant. Like, you talk to people and figure out what works.
[00:12:14] Anna: Unless you have that one friend that’s. No, this is where we’re going.
This is it.
[00:12:17] Ramsey: I was gonna say the CEO of the friend group is. Then you have a. Yeah.
[00:12:21] Janel: Okay. So another aspect that I know sometimes draws blank stares that also Strange Birds and Emma share is that we compensate everybody equally. Can you walk me through your particular compensation model? Because it has some very cool details that I know that Anna is going to geek out over.
[00:12:40] Gwen: Yeah.
[00:12:40] Anna: I’m so excited. I’m in.
[00:12:44] Gwen: Yeah. So our compensation model is basically, we all get a flat salary. There’s, in fact, a minimum salary in the state of New York for officers of the company. So we all get pretty much the minimum salary we can. And then we are additionally paid a percentage of every invoice we clear. So if I do work for a client, I get X percentage of that invoice on top of my completely regular salary.
[00:13:06] Andy: Right.
[00:13:07] Gwen: So you always have a minimum amount of money. And if you need more or you happen to be working a lot more, you get more. Right. So there’s. There’s a bottom. And then if you need more, if you really want to, like, work and make more money, it’s plausible whether you want to do that or not. I don’t think any of the three of us are like, let’s make all the money we can kind of people. I think we’re all willing to, like, trade money for time a little bit, but that is an option. Right. And it means that when a member happens to be working a lot more, they also get compensate a little extra to balance it out. And when a member is not working, they’re not, like, instantly unemployed.
Running, like, it solves the thing Ramsey was talking about. You’re either running out of money or you’re making money. And you’re never in between. This means that you could be in between. There’s a buffer between those two things.
And the co op, like, in the US Being taxed as a co op, there’s, like, advantages. So we issue that, like, we call it, like a commission. It’s, like, for tax purposes. It’s not a commission. We tend to pay it out as a patronage Dividend, specifically a per unit retain, which is like really detaily tax stuff. Yeah. And we can get into the details of the tax stuff, which we’re obviously not experts on, but it is what we’re doing.
[00:14:15] Anna: Gwen, you and I just need to talk offline about all of this. Janel is right. I’m like, tell me more.
So a base salary and then on projects that you are part of that get invoice, you get a percentage of the invoice. So let’s say all three of you work on the same project. All three of you would get some of that percentage of invoice. And at the invoice for people who are like taxes, patronage. What’s this? Gwen, please correct me if I’m wrong. This is going to be my terrible summary of what patronage refunds are. So in a co op, instead of if you’re in a partnership, you might get paid out dividends. Right. That’s a specific type of profit sharing that is taxed in a very specific way. In co ops it’s called patronage refunds and it’s very tax advantage to get patronage refunds versus dividends. I’m not going to go into why because frankly I can’t remember all the details, but it’s good.
So I like how you are thinking about the percentage of invoice. I’m trying not to get too in the weeds, Janel. I promise. I just. So nerding out. We just did all of this. We just converted into a co op like two weeks ago, so.
[00:15:23] Gwen: Oh, wow, congrats.
[00:15:24] Anna: And my job was the. Yeah, my job was the like tax bit of it.
Brain melting.
[00:15:33] Gwen: It’s me and Ramsey at the co op.
[00:15:36] Andy: Yeah. I really recommend getting into a co op with some compiler nerds who want to like dive into tax code. Made my life way easier.
[00:15:46] Gwen: So weird rules.
[00:15:47] Janel: That’s what we’re missing. That’s our next tire.
[00:15:49] Gwen: It’s a fun puzzle.
[00:15:50] Anna: There we go.
And I think that one of the sub reasons of why I like doing work as a co op is because it’s unusual. There’s no necessary playbooks out there, especially for the type of work that we do where it’s usually freelance or agency and you have to get really creative and you have to dig into that. And I find that people who use, I would say typical business models just do what’s always been done and they don’t necessarily dig into the details and think about, wait, there’s a better way to do this work. I’m going to stop talking now. I Could go, oh, yeah, Ramsey and Gwen, can we just hang out and talk about tax code?
[00:16:32] Gwen: Absolutely.
[00:16:33] Ramsey: We have opinions. Some of them are good, some of them are useful. A lot of experiences one way or the other.
[00:16:39] Gwen: Yeah. Our tax people are like, yeah, we have. Our clients have a lot of creative ideas about how equity should work.
[00:16:48] Ramsey: Yeah. But to your point about being creative even within cooperative spaces, so much of patronage as it’s generally understood and talked about, it’s like end of year profit sharing. And we wanted something where we could pay members on the go throughout the year and we didn’t have to wait till the end of the year to get the extra money that you’re entitled to. Yeah. Going out and doing that research and working with good lawyers and working with good tax people is. Yeah, there’s no blueprint.
[00:17:13] Gwen: Right.
[00:17:13] Ramsey: And everyone’s going to do it a little differently and find their own way.
[00:17:16] Anna: I think our journey, we thought a lot about, like, what does it mean to be a member? We approach what quote, full time means differently because we didn’t want it to be 40 hours a week, because neither of us want to work 40 hours a week. So how do we define full time? How do we define what is active? We did a lot in that realm, but patronage refund is, I think, maybe a spot that we could get a little bit more creative with after we get through year one. We’re going to get through year one.
[00:17:41] Gwen: Yeah. Our year one taxes were graphic.
[00:17:44] Andy: They were brutal. Oh, God.
[00:17:45] Gwen: Yeah, I know that.
[00:17:46] Ramsey: Yeah. Year one, we don’t.
[00:17:47] Andy: We don’t talk about it on that note, to talk about it a little bit. We’ve been around for five years and I think our compensation policy has been updated four or five times.
It is definitely the kind of thing that, as we’ve gone along further, we’ve both found what makes sense from a tax perspective as well as, like, how are we best serving our members?
So it’s not like we just came out of the gate and we’re like, oh, we figured it out. This is the right formula.
And we actually have published some on our blog of, like, different versions of our compensation policy, trying to show how that has evolved over time.
[00:18:20] Gwen: We’re still updating it. We were just talking about two admittedly minor tweaks to our policy, but we’re still updating it.
[00:18:27] Andy: That’s one of the nice things about how we operate is we can look at what we’re doing and say, okay, is this serving us best? And if it’s not, we can change it.
[00:18:35] Gwen: Are we Missing stuff. Do we need more?
[00:18:38] Ramsey: In a lot of conversations we have with people who are starting co ops, people are really interested in the specifics of what we do and we totally hear that concrete details are so helpful and the concrete details of other co ops were super helpful for us when we were getting off the ground. But the bottom line is everything is downstream of your worker democracy. And as long as it is a healthy, democratic workplace, you will actively make decisions over time to reflect your needs and course correct and find whatever it is that you all need to take care of each other.
So that really is more important than any of the financial details or any of those gymnastics. Just make sure that you have a good decision making process.
[00:19:22] Janel: You remind me of something that our lawyer, Jacqueline, which is a person that we share between us and Emma, by the way, who’s amazing. And it’s episode four, go check it out. You remind me of something Jacqueline said as we were drawing up our own documents that she prefers for people to have been walking the walk for some time to figure out how they want to be a co op before writing it into the bylaws. A co op should reflect the people who are inside it and people are wonderfully complex and messy and we are always figuring out the ways in which we want to show up, the ways in which we want to exist, and it takes time to do that. The other person I’m going to quote is Anna, who when I joined Strange Birds, just fresh off of the the corporate path, they reminded me that everything is going to go slower than I think. And I was like, what are you talking about? I’m fast, you’re fast, let’s do things quickly. We’ll just figure it out quick and then go, no, that’s really not how it happens. Things take time to emerge and it takes time to test anything out to understand if it’s the right container. And your edge cases, your error cases are not all going to come up all at once.
So stress testing takes time. Seeing if something is the right fit for you takes time. So you can’t just copy paste what somebody else did, unfortunately. But that does mean that you’ll make something eventually cut out to fit yourselves.
[00:20:38] Gwen: Perfect precision. Yeah. I’ve also, I don’t know, I had a very similar experience. Like had to like emotionally accept the fact, like, no businesses move so slow. It’s like you, you send an email and you’re lucky the answer in a month and it’s like, oh, that’s just fine. It’s not like when you’re one person in a business, it’s like your manager wants you to answer now, like right now, when you’re a business, no one cares. They’re like, oh, I don’t know, get to it this tax year, whatever. And it’s. Even if you don’t, it’s like they might send a mean letter like, you didn’t do this thing you said you were going to do. What’s up with that? There’s so all the like bureaucracy and everything is so much slower for businesses. I think probably just because rather than being a single person who can make a decision, a business is always a collection of people who have to make a decision, even if it’s not all of them.
I had to like let go of the anxiety of have to do this now. No you don’t. It’s fine. Get it this quarter, get it this year, it’ll be fine. You could always like retroactively fix it. There’s so many just ways to slow down the business that like, yeah, the government doesn’t care, your insurer does not care. Like, it’s fine, just take it easy. It’s hard to, it’s hard to get through that. Especially if you come from like freelance world where it’s like, no, there’s a deadline, get it done.
[00:21:51] Ramsey: Yeah. And in a sense, particularly in America, corporate persons have more rights than human beings and which is a kind of barbarism but as a co op we all get to take advantage of that. Like we’re all now a collective corporate person and subject to all the like privileges and yeah, the much, much gentler treatment I think by the authorities and by the state. And yeah, I’m, I don’t think the sort of master’s tools can fully unmake the master’s house, but there’s elements of that.
[00:22:23] Andy: Right.
[00:22:24] Ramsey: I think giving cooperative people those sort of levers is net good.
[00:22:29] Anna: I’ve said this quite a few times in interviews, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much. But one of the reasons why we approach this cooperatively and we wanted to be a co op is exactly that. Where this is one way to break something down and to get people to ask questions and questions that they might not be used to asking. Not like, oh, how much money do you make? But like how do you compensate each other? That’s a very different question than how much money do you make? And I think that’s actually the more important question.
That’s more about the people in the business rather than the business itself. What you said Ramsey of there’s a certain barbarism where corporations have more rights than people.
But this is a way to help create that conversation and have it be.
Be contained. Like have it have the necessary nuance that it needs.
[00:23:21] Janel: One of my notes from our pre conversation is that you made it through a 10 month dry spell. Can you tell me more about that? That sounds like many things were probably put to a stress test.
[00:23:32] Ramsey: So if you read the on co ops there’s no shortage of studies that show I think the number is 29% that they are 29% more likely to survive an economic downturn than a capitalist business like we. I knew that at least going in I’m like oh this is a resilient, among other things, a resilient way of organizing. Didn’t love running the experiment though.
It is true we made it because we’re a co op but yep, that really sucked. I think this sort of background is this sort of I think connects or meshes well with some earlier points about the need to change over time and to hold capacity to change for time beyond whatever decisions you’re making as a co op amongst each other.
You are still engaged with a market that is inside of an economy that is inside of a country and there are these forces that are outside of your control that you are subject to independent of your own decisions. We had a really good first year. We managed to land some lucrative contracts as an opening move. The collapse of the tech market caught up with us basically and kind of stratus of mid sized companies that would normally hire people like us.
We’re just going bankrupt left and center, just closing and shuttering and so that the dry spell was an entirely an external thing and we just would pitch projects. There were very few kind of opportunities available and we’d pitch them and they all bounced for or fell through for one reason or another.
And yeah, so that’s like where we found ourselves, right. It’s how we got there. I know if Gwen or Andy want to tell the story of like how we got ourselves out of it.
[00:25:08] Gwen: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Long and short of it is. Yep. Our salaries got compressed. We did not make as much money. We did not get our commissions. We had to like essentially suspend giving ourselves our commission for a while. Like we had just a couple of years with no patronage dividends at all. But the business isn’t dead right. And so that’s like we are all willing to make that to like not quite lend the business money, but lend the business our work and our time to keep it Afloat so that when the market comes back, because it so far always has, we at least, yeah, fingers crossed, when it comes back, we will be ready and we’ll actually be stronger. And that has been the case, actually the last year or two has been quite busy. Right. We’re actually making good money, everything’s stable. And we’re pondering like, is this the moment to add a fourth person?
Part of our intuition around how many people we want is that one freelancer maybe has a 60% chance of being employed on any given day, but four freelancers have a 99% chance that at least a couple of them are employed like that. Those statistics work in your favor. And so when the money is good, it’s a good time to add a little more and then you can shrink those highs and those dips a little bit every time. But yeah, the long short of is, yeah, we just, we got underpaid for a little bit and then we caught ourselves back up as we could within the bounds of laws and taxes and all of that. There are rules around what you kind of get up to there.
[00:26:31] Andy: But we were underpaid for a while because it was a project we all believed in and we wanted to see it through. We did record during that time the commissions that people should have been getting on our books. There was a debt to the individual members from the co op which did get resolved eventually, but it was certainly an act of trust on all our parts that we were going to get to the part where we could resolve it.
[00:26:56] Ramsey: Yeah. And that I think is like, operationally, like co ops aren’t more resilient because they’re like magic.
[00:27:03] Gwen: Right.
[00:27:03] Ramsey: Because they’re fundamentally democratic projects, you can all agree to take certain maneuvers that are just impossible in a hierarchical business. So, yeah, we suspended commissions, we suspended salaries for a couple of pay cycles and recorded that as a debt that the co op eventually resolved, like Andy said. And we did that because Emma is ours and we want it to keep existing and we want to keep, keep doing it. If I was like an employee at a studio and the boss told me, like, hey, I’m going to stop paying you for two months, but I’ll record it on the books and pay you back in a year, I told the fuck off and die. There’s no way, like, in what world? Because it’s not my. It’s almost trust is a word. But I feel like my relationship to someone who is like, legitimately my boss that would like, involve an amount of trust.
But the maneuvers that we did at Emma, there’s trust in that the economy would swing back. But within Emma, I obviously trust Andy and Gwen with my life. But I have agency. I am an owner of this company. I have a full voice in this organization and can consent to certain maneuvers and oppose others. So yeah, they’re resilient because you have access to tactics and strategies that are just off the table. Otherwise, if you’re not organized this way.
[00:28:18] Gwen: So the members of a co op actually get the benefit of doing these gambles and these sacrifices. Whereas if it’s. I’m not gonna risk my salary for the shareholders, I don’t care. But when I am the shareholders and I know that the other two shareholders are my good friends Ramsey and Andy, it’s like, all right, yeah, let’s take that risk. Let’s make it work. You’re actually motivated to take the risk. Whereas if you’re just an employee in a business, like, why would I do that? This doesn’t get me anything.
And even. And it doesn’t even get anybody. I actually care about anything. Right. There’s no justification to do it in a sort of capitalist oriented business.
[00:28:51] Anna: Yeah, it wasn’t 10 months, but we had a pretty severe, I think three month dry spell over last summer. There was a moment after month two, because summers are usually slow for us. Nobody wants to do things. No one wants to think strategy and marketing in the summer. They want to go on vacation, fine. We expected a slow, but we didn’t expect like a drought.
And by month two, I, I was starting to like, be like, it’s okay, it’ll come back. And I’m like, do I believe that?
But we were both like, okay, no, the important thing is that we’re going to keep showing up and we’re going to keep showing up and we’re going to keep showing up because we believe in this and we want this and we know it’s going to swing back around. And I think that resiliency, such a gift. And I know, Ramsey, you said co ops aren’t magic, but I disagree.
[00:29:40] Ramsey: Yeah, I maybe overcompensate for how as a person, I am breathlessly committed to the project of the destruction of capitalism and anarchy. So I try and couch all of my sort of senses. These are practical and tactical. There’s boring reasons to be doing all this stuff. But yeah, this stuff is. I’m actively radicalized and energized every single day working at Emma. And it is a deep, good kind of magic, for sure.
[00:30:06] Anna: Yeah, you gotta pick your audience, friends and family members who are like, but equity money. And I’m like, here’s why. And then my like, radical, like activists and organizers, I’m like, I’m in a co op.
[00:30:19] Janel: And they’re like, ana, you’ve reminded me of a question that my dad always has. Dad, if you listen to this podcast.
[00:30:25] Anna: Hi.
[00:30:26] Janel: He always asks what our long term plan is, by which he means, how are you going to grow?
But for the people in this room, I don’t think that’s how we’re thinking about long term. Is it?
The word that comes more to mind for me is sustainability and how I can keep doing work in a way that makes sense for me and as a container for my life, such that I can keep that going for as long as I want to be doing it.
[00:30:52] Andy: The way you phrase it is exactly how we’re approaching it. We are not interested in infinite growth.
We want to be able to do the work that feels good for us. To be able to live comfortably and have time to make art.
That’s the goal.
[00:31:08] Ramsey: Yeah. This is like, we’re there. As far as I’m concerned.
If I can do this kind of work and take psychic damage from AI shit every day too, Everyone loves telling me that robot’s going to take my job every day. And there’s a real sadness, honestly, that I experience like watching a lot of software people, like, very excited about turning the craft of software development to email. Basically just like writing like text into a box and hoping you get the right thing out of it. And part of what I find depressing about that is I’m actually not trying to write less software. I love the work that I do. I deeply love it. And I just want to keep doing this.
And until they put me in the ground, there isn’t. That is the long term plan.
And you had asked us in the email something that I’ve been thinking about over the past week, which is, yeah, how do you think about sustainability versus growth? And I think something that I said earlier, which is thinking about beyond just the morality and the ethics of anti capitalist organizing. What are the practicalities of it?
I think something that of the many sort of shortcomings of capitalism, it really collapses all activity into a single verb, a single operation, which is profit.
And profit is not everyone gets compensated. Profit is not like people who do the work get paid. Profit is money has turned into more money. Strictly if you’re breaking even, you’re not doing the thing. And so under capitalism, that’s all you can do. Right? The system cannot actually express anything else. And if you can find a way to encode whatever it is that you as a human being want to do in terms of profitable activity, then capitalism can support it.
And in the Venn diagram of useful and interesting activities and profitable activities, there’s some overlap, sure. But there’s a huge world that is just inexpressible. There’s stuff you can’t express as profitable activity that are still interesting and useful. And I think when it comes to sustainability and being able to navigate the future and uncertainties and things that are going to come up, down the pike, I think a lot of the. You just need more verbs.
I think a lot of the stuff you might need to do is outside of that overlap. And we can do that because we’re a co op, because access to verbs like delay defer these other things. And when you take infinite growth off the table, this entire world of possibilities opens up. And of that world, yeah, we’re trying to just keep our lights on as long as possible and keep doing the work we love doing.
[00:33:42] Janel: I’m going to print that out in like, this poster that I can see from my desk.
[00:33:45] Anna: That was glorious, Ramsey.
[00:33:47] Janel: Oh, my God.
[00:33:48] Anna: The whole speech, the whole monologue, like, print the whole thing out. It’s like, this is our new manifesto. That was so cool.
[00:33:53] Janel: Really.
[00:33:54] Anna: Damn, I’m like fired up right now.
[00:33:57] Janel: I know. If people would like to find out more about Emma Cooperative and what y’ all are all about, where should they go?
[00:34:05] Gwen: Emma Co Op. Yeah, that’s the one.
[00:34:07] Anna: There’s.
[00:34:07] Gwen: There’s everything on there. We don’t do that much social media. None of us are super social media people. But yeah, Emma Co op, we’re working on updating our blog. We have a blog that tells people about what the heck we’re doing, which is frequently the one people want to see. It’s okay, what are you doing?
But yeah, that would be. That. That would be the good one. And we have a mastodon. That’s our only social media. We don’t keep it up that much, but it’s there.
[00:34:31] Ramsey: We have friends that run a bakery co op called Sea and Soil in the city. And their social media is just good and beautiful. And there’s also Cup Dragon. This is like video game co op. Just a bunch of really young game designers. Their social media is so good. So I’m always like, ah. All we have are like text files and NDA shit that we can’t post. So yeah, our social media is not the best. But yeah, the website is definitely a good place to go and shoot us an email. We’re always happy to like talk to people over email and meet and hang out if people are in the city.
[00:35:00] Gwen: Perfect.
[00:35:01] Janel: So I saved the most important question for last. How come you called Emma if none of you are named Emma?
[00:35:08] Gwen: This is, I think Ramsey’s suggestion. We decided by consensus. You’ll be shocked to know it’s after Emma Goldman, an anarchist operating in New York City.
Good person to name a business after
[00:35:17] Ramsey: might be an acronym for everybody making money in art but it’s still the jury’s out on that one but yeah, definitely Emma Goldman who’s an amazing read everything she’s ever written. She’s just an amazing orator and theorist One of the first people I think in the political left to say hey I think queer people are comrades some someone had to be the first.
[00:35:37] Anna: Had to be the first.
[00:35:38] Ramsey: Yeah it was her then.
[00:35:41] Janel: If Emma ever makes merch I want it like big patch I’m seeing it.
[00:35:45] Ramsey: It’s not a bad idea We’ve talked about jumpsuits which would be really.
I just. I really want to roll up to
[00:35:52] Gwen: the install we go on site with clients a lot and it’ll be very funny to have the
[00:35:59] Ramsey: Life is best.
[00:36:05] Janel: Flying the coop is brought to you by strange birds a strategy to execution co op for organizations doing complex meaningful work when the opportunity is obvious but execution feels impossible we turn big ideas into real progress Find us at Strangebirds Land.