“We wanted a way to help people pursue projects they are passionate about.”
Oh hey everyone, you wanna listen to this one with Brandon Reid and Andrew Jacob, cofounders of Heirloom. They are two best friends who thought “what if you could have fun building something, share ownership, and not burn out in 6 months?”
Welcome to Heirloom.
Heirloom is a platform for long-term co-ownership, designed to help builders find collaborators, share ownership, and give early-stage projects the stability they need to actually grow. It’s not a co-op, but it shares the same spirit as many co-ops: care deeply and build together.
In this convo, we talk about what Heirloom is all about, how it breaks down the triangle-shaped economy, and more:
- What makes a job easier (hint: it involves foraging in the woods)
- How collaborative governance and ownership structures are a way to make awesome work happen
- How Heirloom helps people pursue passion projects
- Why ‘slow burn’ passion projects are so critically important, and honestly the more successful ones
Y’all.
Let this episode be a reminder that you can build a way to work that fits you.
Because the current typical model of business structures (big boss with big pay and power, employees with meager pay and power) doesn’t work.
Action items:
- How is collaboration structured in your workplace?
- How do you feel about sharing equity in an idea? What feelings does it bring up, and why?
- When was there a time you wished collaboration was easier? What did you try? What worked and didn’t work?
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Subscribe for easy access to transcripts, show notes, our secret insider thoughts on the interviews… and the occasional goof reel.
Read the raw transcript:
[00:00:06] Anna: Welcome to Flying the Coop, a podcast about rethinking how business works and who it should work for.
[00:00:14] Janel: We are Janelle and Anna, small business owners learning in public as we turn our company Strange Birds into a worker owned co op. And today we are interviewing Brandon Reed and Andrew Jacob, who are co founders of the company and Heirloom. Heirloom is a platform for long term co ownership and it’s designed to help builders find their collaborators, to share ownership and to give early stage projects the stability that they need to actually grow and flourish. It’s not a co op, but it shares a lot of the same spirit as many co ops to care deeply and to build together.
[00:00:46] Anna: Brandon originally started Heirloom as a college independent study, sparked by his interest in rethinking how people work and build together. After spending some time at Meta, he left in 2024 to pursue IDEA full time.
Andrew comes from a computer science research background and after finishing his Bachelor’s he decided to go all in on Heirloom with Brandon, his longtime friend of nearly 15 years. For both of them, building something meaningful together just made sense. We totally get that.
We are so excited to dig into their journey and explore what it takes to build a new kind of structure for creative collaboration.
So our first question, we thought long and hard about it.
You two are besties who went into business together and so are we. So can you tell us about that journey?
[00:01:36] Brandon: So yeah, like you said, me and Andrew, besties just like you guys, we’ve known each other for 15 years and it really came down to just having a long relationship of collaboration together throughout school and even after school and college, we went our separate ways. I think me and Andrew kept an open line of communication. We were always bouncing ideas off each other, getting feedback from each other, and that kind of led to working together for Heirloom. Heirloom was something that I started as a college independent study and obviously it was something I shared with Andrew while I was working on it and as I went to go work at Meta. So over time that progressed into a situation where we both felt like it was something worth pursuing and we definitely want to do it together. It’s a hard job and we felt like we were perfect people to complement each other.
[00:02:22] Andrew: I’d say since we’ve like known each other for so long, we have a pretty good idea of like personality traits and like, I guess like strengths and weaknesses. I’d say that that is one of like weird quirks instead of like working with a stranger or classmate that you may not have known for long enough, and then, like, figuring that out as you go, like, knowing all of it up front makes it easier, I think.
[00:02:42] Brandon: Because we’ve known each other for so long, we definitely have situations where we’re starting to work, and then that evolves into us just talking about random stuff for 30 minutes.
We like to go on hikes. I know Andrew’s a big forager, so we’ve been going on hikes. We’ll spend time just doing random stuff. And I think that makes the job that much easier, because when you’re working on a business, I feel like a lot of time is spent working on that business. But when you’re working on it with the friends, there’s. It’s very easy to transition into something that’s way more relaxing. It’s not as hard to get burnt out. And I think that’s. That’s really powerful.
[00:03:14] Anna: A really important question for. For Andrew the forager. So we just foraged, like, three pounds of chanterelles. What was your most recent haul?
[00:03:24] Andrew: My most recent haul.
It’s been a bit of a dry season recently.
I found some platyphal mushrooms earlier this year because they’re an early summer mushroom. I found, like, an old chicken of the woods, like, about a month ago.
I would say one of my more exciting hauls was I brought my girlfriend foraging for the first time, and the first mushroom she found was a morel that was like the size of a fist. And they’re exceptionally rare on the east coast just due to the acidity in the soil because they tend to grow in more alkali soils. So finding that one was extremely impressive.
[00:04:02] Anna: Listen, we can’t talk about anything else now, okay?
Ah, that sounds incredible. All right, switching.
We should. Andrew, we should just switch.
[00:04:12] Janel: You can make one of your famous business metaphors, Anna. Like, how is collaboration? Like finding mushrooms in the wood?
[00:04:19] Anna: Sure, yeah. I mean, like, the mycelia that connects us all, and then it fruits when there’s. Anyway, okay, so getting back to Heirloom, if you could.
If you could describe the concept of Heirloom to the viewers and listeners of the podcast, I think that would be really great. So then we can, like, really dig into the whys behind it.
[00:04:43] Brandon: So essentially, Heirloom is an online platform for people with ideas to find their team, manage and grow their ideas, and kind of co own in success. And we emphasize the co ownership. And we’re on a podcast for co ops because Heirloom really believes that rewarding people for their work and utilizing, like, collaborative governance, collaborative Ownership structure is really useful for early stage projects to kind of give them the stability they need to, like, grow and make sure they don’t die.
And so our goal with Heirloom is to help people who have ideas but also have other responsibilities. They might have a day job, they might have bills to pay, they may have just other things going on in their life that make it very difficult to go pursue, pursue a project that they’re really passionate about. And by helping them find their team, connecting them with their team, and giving them this sort of support network that’s pretty difficult to find, especially after you leave college. Our goal is to help them, you know, take these projects, find passionate individuals that want to help them build it and bring them together to do so. And that’s what Heirloom is really all about and why we kind of chose a co op sort of structure to support these businesses.
[00:05:52] Janel: Tell me a little bit more about how you want to work with people who maybe are strapped for resources but want to contribute to a project anyway. That’s super, super interesting because like most traditional business models just think either you’re full time or you’re part time and like, that’s it, one size fits all. And you’re adding a lot more nuance to that conversation.
[00:06:11] Andrew: Yeah, we wanted to make sure that people with talent but don’t have the equity up front are able to build their passion project to the fullest extent.
I would say that, like, the core of Heirloom’s mission is we want to make sure that people are able to build what they want to build. Like collaborative ownership and collaborative governance is a vessel to make that mission happen.
The Heirloom, I guess governance structure is modeled after daos, which is blockchain based.
And while that, while daos and blockchain have a lot of positives, there are a lot of negatives that come with it. So. So we’re just planning on taking the positive aspects and moving forward and building upon that to, I guess, change the stigma around that sort of organizational structure.
[00:06:56] Anna: That’s actually kind of our next question. So the looms are understood. We’re going to say back to you, what are looms? Are someone has a project and then people start like weaving their talents into it, right? And they create a loom. So the loom structure feels part governance, part game mechanic, part hackathon. Ish. Like, how did, how did you choose the best pieces of all of those elements to come together? Team process there.
[00:07:26] Brandon: That’s, that’s a great question.
I think it was really like over the course of our development of Heirloom, looking at daos and kind of the structure that they provide, a lot of it is similar where people are kind of given tokens in exchange for their work, in exchange for their capital and ideas and stuff like that. We wanted to do something similar on Heirloom. And so we, as we developed and as we brought people on to kind of test our structure and improve upon it, we found that this mixture of things you were talking about, kind of like the gamifying of things, the hackathonish, the reward of work, was something that was really effective and allowed a lot of different idea types to utilize this sort of structure.
[00:08:07] Anna: So it’s really interesting how you’re talking about this and my brain is thinking about the co op model, which is kind of a slow process. Right? You need to bring the people together, decide your structure, how you make decisions.
You’re kind of figuring out how do you scale that a little bit to.
To basically spread the good news of what collaboration could look like maybe a little faster? Is that, is that a fair thing to say?
[00:08:32] Brandon: Yeah, definitely, definitely fair. The collaborative model, I think the biggest setback could be at scale. It becomes a little bit bureaucratic where there’s a lot of processes going on that take a lot of time.
And I think there’s a lot of like, optimizations that we’re looking at at Heirloom. And I think other collaborative models look at like, co ops and daos to solve these issues. And I think it’s a really interesting, like, kind of field of study, ways to kind of break down the structure into smaller groups again so they can optimize. There’s a lot of opportunity there, I think, to make these structures that much more sound at scale.
[00:09:08] Janel: Well, it sounds like a lot of this really revolves around kind of a philosophy of joy of work, if I can call it that. Like, when you feel ownership in what you’re doing, when you feel genuinely interested and passionate about it, then you will want to put your time and energy into that. And so it’s like it’s building a structure to kind of harness that rather than assuming work is something that sucks and is going to drain you and it’s what you, you have to do in exchange for capital. You know, it’s flipping the whole model on its, on its head.
[00:09:39] Andrew: Yeah, exactly. That’s like one of our key tenets. Something else is we wanted to tackle some of like, the unfulfillment that workers feel. A lot of the times they’re not the Ones reaping the benefits, their own reward. People at the top of the food chain are the ones reaping the benefits. So we plan, plan to empower workers and thus, and have that empowerment, I guess give workers the joy of work and make them feel more, more inclined to give their best work forward rather than minimum wage, minimum effort.
[00:10:10] Brandon: There’s definitely like a growing trend I think we hear from like friends and family all the time, like, my job sucks, I’m not fulfilled, like I wish I was doing something else. And you can also kind of look at the growing amount of like unemployment especially and like the software engineering fields where me and Andrew come from. There’s a lot of people who are looking for jobs, looking for work to do, and they want to do something that makes them happy and fulfilled. And I think switching that structure and giving people that space to feel fulfilled and do work that’s meaningful, like it really does help make the business itself that much more strong and structured.
[00:10:42] Anna: Yeah, it’s almost like taking what our, what the economy is now is very triangle shaped. Right. Like big dog at the top and then it kind of just, it never trickles down. Right. But it’s a, it’s a pyramid shape and what you’re trying to build here is a more circular economy.
Right. People talk about the future of business and it’s usually, especially now, it’s like remote and AI and the next cool tech thing that will be invented. But heirloom seems to be built on the, the idea that the future of work is collaborative.
Like, why do you think that is?
[00:11:21] Andrew: I think the ethos of heirloom is a little bit counterculture at the moment. Like right now, the trend with startups and like passion projects is you need to integrate AI, you need to integrate like an overly complicated tech stack and you need to be completely focused on revenue. And in addition to that, like the, there is a little bit of a hustle culture that’s going on right now within like tech industry and people that are more entrepreneurial in that industry.
And I guess we’re going against that. And we believe that passion projects are meant to be like slow burn, something that people enjoy doing rather than like have to constantly hustle, hustle, hustle and like focus on getting revenue like tomorrow.
[00:12:02] Anna: Yeah. And coming from the messaging, marketing side of that, when it’s hustle, hustle, revenue tomorrow, it’s, it lasts like six months.
[00:12:10] Brandon: Yeah.
[00:12:11] Anna: And it breaks.
So then what are you actually building? You did all this work for what?
[00:12:17] Andrew: Yeah, it’s just not a sustainable model. And we’re sort of looking past like the six month mark and we’re trying to make it so that people can build sustainable, collaborative passion projects.
[00:12:29] Brandon: You gave us a perfect segue to explain what our name’s all about. The name Heirloom.
Heirloom was made because of the concept of people want to create something that’s important and that they value and similar to like a family heirloom, you know, something that’s treasured and passed down through generations. We wanted to help people create that. You know, their idea is something they treasure, they want to pass down with other people. And that’s kind of like the, the concept and the reason we chose the name Heirloom. It just happens to work out that we can use the name like Loom for, like, organizations. And before you, like, we’re talking about weaving together work.
[00:13:04] Janel: I also have to admit that I think of heirloom tomatoes, which is a lovely thing to have in mind also.
Super nice.
[00:13:10] Brandon: That is.
[00:13:11] Andrew: We’ve gotten that a lot.
[00:13:12] Brandon: Yeah, man.
[00:13:14] Anna: Now I just want a juicy tomato. Thanks, Janelle.
[00:13:17] Janel: You’re welcome.
I have a question. And you use the word counterculture, and I agree, that’s a little bit why we wanted to make this podcast in the first place, because we think we’re representing something that isn’t very much in the mainstream but is in fact happening. When you are trying to sell the idea to other people, do you find that you’re running against that current, like, what. What sticking points do people have?
[00:13:41] Brandon: Some people we pitch the idea to are instantly in love. They see kind of where the future might lead in terms of collaboration. They see like these modern trends and they see that kind of being an end goal, and they end up being like really strong believers of the product.
Other people, I think because we approach our pitches by solving their problems, it ends up not being something where we get to push against the grain. We’re not necessarily coming in and pitching and saying, like, hey, you’re going to make a collaborative organization and you’re going to like it. We’re more asking them if we can solve their problem, which is, can we help you build your team in a stronger way than before? Can we help you find people that want to help build with you? And genuinely, people are really receptive to that, and that’s kind of what brings them in and that’s what keeps. Keeps them going. And then when we explain the collaborative ownership to them, they’re like, oh, this makes sense. Like, I understand why you want to utilize it, and I’m Happy to be a part of it.
[00:14:32] Anna: Are there any success stories that you are allowed or willing to share to kind of give an example of what this can look like in action?
[00:14:41] Brandon: One of our biggest successes so far is a user that we met through a pitch competition. He’s working on an app called Impaws, and it’s a gamified kind of app to curb impulse spending.
And he came onto our platform and he’s been using it to kind of find his team and develop his product. And so far, he launched his beta in around a month of development time.
So we’re really proud of that.
[00:15:06] Andrew: We have a user that we reached out to online.
He was promoting his project on Reddit, and we thought he’d be a good fit for Heirloom. He’s working on something called Kindred, which is a small suite of social media platforms. The main value add for Kindred is with the way social media is right now, it’s designed to, like, capture your attention span and, like, put you in an echo chamber. The more content you agree with, the more content you swipe on. And it’s just designed to keep you angry and engaged.
So his main differentiator is that alongside the content that’s being shown you, he will have an algorithmic score and show you, like, how in line with your algorithm, this content is. And in addition to that, he will try and give you, like, diversity in your algorithm. So instead of, like, just putting you in the echo chamber, his algorithm will show you things that are outside of what you’re used to and show you the diversity score with that.
So while you’re like, mindlessly swiping, you can see, like, how your algorithm is trying to steer you in one direction or another.
[00:16:14] Anna: Incredible. I completely deleted all of my meta accounts back in January because I was just like, done. I’m on LinkedIn because I have to be because of work, but that’s the type of, I think a lot about, about media literacy. And it’s like be building media literacy into the platform itself. Okay, so with Heirloom, what made you both decide you were the people to build this?
[00:16:42] Brandon: Yeah, my dad is a small business owner, someone who’s worked kind of at the early stage of startup development. And I kind of grew up watching him do this, trying to build relationships and utilize, like, not necessarily the same exact collaborative structure, but I would say, like, a lot of his business was through partnerships.
And I kind of watched that as I up grew up. And I just had a drive to do something like this. And so I spent A lot of time researching this, learning more about the alternative forms of governance, and kind of working towards an idea like Heirloom.
[00:17:13] Andrew: Both of us are technical co founders. Our backgrounds are both in computer engineering. Just due to happenstance and since we shared a lot of similar skill sets, we believed that we had the technical chops and the background and expertise to build Heirloom. We thought there was a void in the market for it. And why not us?
[00:17:36] Janel: Yeah, I feel like often the answer for, like, work that’s done with a great deal of joy is why not me, why not us? You know, I want to see this in the world.
I should be the one to make it. And that’s a big propeller kind of thinking about that, the broader picture.
If Heirloom were to realize its, its dreams, what. What would you wish for other business owners to take away from seeing this model in action?
[00:18:03] Andrew: I think right now there aren’t as many small business owners as there should be. Especially in the tech industry, it’s just really hard to compete with large conglomerates like Google and with like brick and mortar businesses, it’s really difficult to compete with Amazon. And there’s also blackrock doing blackrock and like private equity things.
So I think I would want other builders to feel more empowered to go out and do their own thing rather than feel like they need to work at a larger corporation. When people are building side projects, people are either expecting to like, create a unicorn or just like have a resume bullet point. And I want there to exist something in between.
And I also want there to be enough visibility that younger entrepreneurs and engineers can look at it and then see that this is a path forward.
[00:18:55] Anna: I love that. Yes.
Again, Janel and I are messengers and marketers, right? So we see the startups that are like, we’re gonna. We want a billion dollar exit. And we’re like, is that the only reason you’re building this?
Like, do you know how rare that happens? What if you just focus on building a great product?
Speaking of dreams, what are your dreams for Heirloom? Like, where, where do you hope to see it grow over the years? Billion dollar exit. Yes. No, maybe.
[00:19:28] Andrew: Yeah.
Billion dollar exit.
A great dream for Heirloom would be for it to be. Be on par with something like Kickstarter or Fiverr, where people with talent can go to heirloom and then reasonably work on projects that are financially and personally fulfilling.
[00:19:56] Brandon: Yeah, I 100% agree with Andy. I think our ideal future of Heirloom is we want it to be so that, like, if, if you are someone with an idea or talent and in your head you’re thinking, I want to work on this or I want to go find something to work on. We want them to think about heirloom, be able to go to heirloom and kind of execute upon that.
[00:20:15] Anna: Yeah, it’s almost like, so, you know, we funder. It’s so we funder for people who don’t know. It’s a think instead of Kickstarter where you just like throw some money and you get cool shit out of it. Right. We funder is you are building. You are like paying in equity to build a thing.
However, you’re not actively building it, your money is. So it’s almost like heirloom is the. Can we build it first together and build it up together?
And that’s so needed in this marketplace.
[00:20:45] Janel: It just reminds me so much of hackathons at Meta. Every time that I got the chance to actually participate in one, it was the best. It was like the most fun that I had at work ever. And there was just an enormous joy at the end of, like, look at this thing we made. And it’s not related to anything else that I’ve been doing, but I made a thing that I believed in and it felt great. I got to do with other people who really cared about making something that we think should exist. And it feels like it captures a bit of that spirit. And that’s one of the things I really like about, about what I see at heirloom.
[00:21:16] Brandon: Yeah, 100%. It’s. It’s really trying to utilize people’s like, collective passion and just like, want to have fun to build something, you know, like, we’re as people, we all just want to build, we want to do something, we want to make things.
And I think, like, utilizing that sort of passion, that happiness that comes to build something great is like really, really powerful and giving people that opportunity. Like, you’re going to do better work if they really want to.
[00:21:44] Janel: My last question is. So y’ all need any marketers, content designers?
Yes, actually, quite seriously, like, put out the call. What kind of people do you hope join the looms that exist today?
[00:21:58] Andrew: Right now we’re looking for technical collaborators.
Our biggest priority is making sure that our early stage ideas can get to alpha and beta. And then once they do get to alpha and beta, then we plan on getting marketers, content creators, et cetera.
There is like, I guess in the startup world there is like the idea that just from the idea stage, you can start marketing right off the get go. And then start looking at like revenue options and like assessing traction.
But we’re more focused on the product rather than like the revenue. At the end of the day, what.
[00:22:34] Anna: You all are building over at Heirloom is exactly what you said. It’s. There’s a big gap in how things are done and I don’t even want to say the marketplace. It’s a gap in how things are done. Right. There’s not an infrastructure beyond founder led hype machines or I built a thing over the weekend and it just like gathers dust, but it has a good idea. But I need people to help me out. Right.
[00:23:00] Andrew: Something that’s a little bit hidden in the website is first how involved we are with each project and how invested we are in each of our users. Like we take a lot of time out of our day to reach out to users, cold email them, set up one on one meetings and just like hear about their progress. Like I think for right now we have about 15 users and we added all of them at the same time to be our first cohort.
I think our involvement in our first cohort is something that isn’t very tangible and measurable on our website.
They can reach out to us at any time for either business help or tech help because that’s our background. That’s sort of what we do. If they just want to talk about their projects, their progress or their struggles, we’re there to listen and help guide them one way or another.
[00:23:52] Brandon: We really are extremely involved in our early stage projects and we’re really proud and happy to share that. I think that’s kind of a massive thing that sets us apart and one thing that keeps our customers coming back is how much we really care and invest in them. We spend a lot of time making sure they know we’re here, letting like in one on ones with them talking. And sometimes it’s more about just their projects too. Sometimes it’s about larger goals and stuff. We’re really here to help people at the end of the day move forward.
[00:24:22] Janel: It really makes you stand out from a lot of other business communities that I’ve seen where like there’s a group at the center and they attract people into their platform and it’s like very unidirectional in a way. This sounds like your model of working with your community is itself collaborative.
[00:24:38] Brandon: Yeah. At the end of the day, like we want to build an heirloom community as well. Heirloom should be a great platform to put your idea, find people. But we want a community. We want people on the platform to kind of be able to know each other and support each other. Just because you’re not, you don’t want to join someone’s idea doesn’t mean you don’t have something to offer them. And we want to, like, facilitate those sort of relationships. So Heirloom, at its core, right now, we’re starting as a community, and as it grows, we hope to maintain that community aspect of it.
[00:25:07] Anna: So for folks listening who maybe aren’t tech people like me, but are listening to this and they’re like, whoa, I really want to sign up. I want to see what projects are on and see how I can help. Is. Is this like a. Yeah, sign up, let’s go.
[00:25:26] Andrew: Absolutely. Awesome.
[00:25:28] Anna: Ownvid invitation to people who are listening.
[00:25:31] Brandon: Yeah.
[00:25:33] Andrew: There’s so many different things that can be done for projects, whether it’s copywriting, graphic design, marketing, like you mentioned earlier. I guess for the Heirloom project as well. Like, these are all aspects that we’ve had to dabble in, and we’re open to adding collaborators.
We added a feature recently where if you see a project that you find interesting, you can sort of, like, request an open role in the project and, like, send them, like, your skill set to join. So if you see an opportunity, I would say reach out. And the worst they can say is.
[00:26:08] Anna: No, I love that.
Yeah, sweet. So it could also be a great space for. Maybe it’s. You have a. An idea that’s like, in your head or, like, partly developed, and you’re like, I’m ready to get a team, but I don’t know how to do that. This is a space for them.
[00:26:24] Brandon: Oh, exactly. Yeah.
I think you can come to Heirloom at any stage of your idea, whether you’re just thinking about it or you’re kind of farther down the road, you develop some stuff. I think at any point in that process, you. You can use a team. And especially for people that might be hesitant with just an idea, like, I think the second you put it on a platform like Lumen starts to, you know, mature and develop and starts becoming real and finding people that love your idea, love what you’re working on, and come to support it, like, that is. That is enough to. To get the idea off the ground, to make it mature and develop. So, yeah, like, even people with just ideas, like, we’d love to talk to you, and we hope you can find your people to. To grow it.
[00:27:05] Janel: This is. This is fantastic. Like, thank you both.
Especially the bit about the mushrooms. What do you even do with a morel that size? I don’t. I mean, I’ve never seen them bigger than maybe a thimble.
[00:27:15] Andrew: Um, pan fry it with garlic, butter and herbs.
[00:27:20] Anna: Yes.
[00:27:23] Janel: Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a strategic messaging co op for businesses who care loudly. From websites to onboarding flows, launches to long term strategies, find us at Strangebirds dot Land.