Post Growth Entrepreneurship (PGE) reframes business as a form of activism, art, spirituality, and creative expression. PGE questions entrepreneurial "common wisdom" and re-envisions business as a vehicle for pure positive impact.
Melanie Rieback is a cybersecurity entrepreneur and the founder of Nonprofit Ventures, an organization dedicated to supporting post growth entrepreneurs. She runs an incubator to support post growth entrepreneurs and teaches a course at the University of Amsterdam on post growth entrepreneurship. Her lectures are available on YouTube, linked below.
This episode builds on a long series of conversations on this podcast exploring economic reform: stakeholder capitalism, steward ownership, co-ops, post-growth economics, to name a few. While it's called pot growth entrepreneurship, really this conversation is about non-extractive entrepreneurship. PGE rejects the typical silicon valley model of capital, scale, exit, in favor of bootstrapping, flat growth, and non-extraction.
In this conversation Jenny and Melanie discuss:
Resources:
Introduction
Melanie Rieback: [00:00:00] If we could limit or if not completely remove the financial extraction from the company, then organically emergently different behavior would need to emerge because without financial extraction, then really impact is the only reason that a company has for existing.
Jenny Stefanotti: That's Melanie Rieback. She's a cybersecurity entrepreneur, as well as the founder of Nonprofit Ventures, an organization that supports post growth entrepreneurs. This is the Denison podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stefanotti. In this episode, we're discussing post growth entrepreneurship. And what we mean by that is what it looks like to do social entrepreneurship in a way that truly does not have misaligned financial incentives.
This is a pretty provocative conversation as it takes us to the far end of corporate governance models where the extraction incentive is fully kept in check by a company's governance structures. Melanie has an amazing story herself. She started a company and adopted progressive models, and [00:01:00] then she started an incubator to teach other entrepreneurs what she learned.
Now she also teaches a course on post growth entrepreneurship at the University of Amsterdam and is working on policy in Europe to create new corporate forms for non extractive businesses. We cover a lot of ground in this one. Melanie tells us why she thinks business is one of the most effective forms of activism.
We talk about what's wrong with both the Silicon Valley model of entrepreneurship as well as social enterprise as we know it. We discuss issues with many steward ownership models. We discuss the three principles for post growth entrepreneurship and leverage points that Melanie sees for systemic change.
As always, you can find show notes in the transcript for this episode on our website, becomingdenizen. com. There you can sign up for our newsletter. I bring our latest content to your inbox alongside information about online and in person Denizen events and announcements from our many partner organizations.
Episode
All right. I'm excited to share this one with everyone and hear your thoughts. Melanie, it's absolutely a delight to bring you to the Denizen podcast. We were introduced a couple of months [00:02:00] ago and we talked about your work for, I don't know, five minutes. And I instantly it was clear that I needed to bring you on to talk about post growth entrepreneurship.
So thanks so much for being here with us. Your story is such an inspiration and the work that you're doing is so
Melanie Rieback: incredibly important. so much for inviting me. I think also your podcast is wonderful, by the way.
Jenny Stefanotti: Oh, thank you. I love doing it. What I really appreciate about your work is that it brings together so many things that we have been talking about over the years in this conversation, really investigating how we can reform the economy and what that looks like, and understanding that that really gets instantiated at the level of corporate behaviors.
And we've learned a lot about different corporate forms Steward ownership. We've talked about stakeholder capitalism. We've talked about co ops. Understanding that that's really where the rubber meets the road, but also seeing the reality that for many entrepreneurs that are interested in adopting these more [00:03:00] progressive forms, they struggle to compete in the dominant economic paradigm.
And so you teach a course on post growth entrepreneurship. You have an incubator on post growth entrepreneurship. You're a fellow at the Post Growth Institute, which is one of the partners of Denizens. I want to start the conversation actually with your background as an entrepreneur, because you came to this work through your own experience starting a cybersecurity company that you wanted to do differently.
And that's really where the blueprint started to take shape that has then taken the form and the work that you're doing to try to propagate this way of doing entrepreneurship as a counterpoint to entrepreneurship as we know it writ large. So why don't we start with your story there?
Melanie Rieback: Sure. So I guess first and foremost, I'm a cybersecurity professional.
So I've been in cybersecurity now for about 23 years. So a long time. I am also a trained academic. I was an assistant professor of computer science also at the Free [00:04:00] University of Amsterdam for about seven, eight years. Eventually I transitioned out into the industry. I also worked for Citrix on the Zen hypervisor team.
I worked at ING bank and their cybercrime team. And eventually, of course, I started my own startups, radically open security in the same area. The reason why I actually started my cybersecurity company was just quite simply because I was really appalled by the behavior of market leaders, and I had a whole lot of friends that were just getting incredibly burned out for these ethically challenged cybersecurity companies.
To the extent that, I mean, I have friends who've left the industry because they just couldn't take how the companies were expecting them to behave anymore. And, you know, for reasons like that, I really knew we needed a social enterprise in cyber security. But of course, when you say social enterprise, of course these days, What on earth does that mean?
Because it just seems like it's a whole layer of [00:05:00] marketing that you add on the top of something with a toxic business model. And I didn't really know at the time when I started it 10 years ago, how to do it differently. So initially I got an idea from a friend of mine, this guy Michiel Leynars, to use this interesting sort of church business model called the Fiscal Fundraising Institution, which long story short requires an entrepreneur to donate 90 percent of its profits to charity.
And the last 10 percent is the cash flow buffer. That is highly unusual. But I also made the decision also to give away my company, basically 100 percent of the shares, to a foundation. And I made this decision also roughly 10 years ago. I was once the sole shareholder of, uh, Radically Open Security. But I, what I was really attempting to do here was to separate profit motive from the actual operational vehicle of a cybersecurity company.
With the whole idea that perhaps if we could get rid of the [00:06:00] financial incentives to misbehave, then perhaps the leftover would be Well, good behavior, because, you know, a company would no longer be motivated by extracting financially and then externalizing costs onto society and onto the planet. That was anyway, my hypothesis.
So
Jenny Stefanotti: to put a fine point on it, it's the extraction incentive more than it's the profit motive. Because you put all of the shares into a foundation so that you weren't able to extract.
Melanie Rieback: Yeah, exactly. So I just figured if we could limit or if not completely remove the financial extraction from the company, then organically, emergently different behavior would need to emerge because without financial extraction, then really.
Impact is the only reason that a company has for existing. So anyway, that was my hypothesis All those years ago
Jenny Stefanotti: and when you did that, were you familiar with steward ownership or did you just inadvertently? establish a [00:07:00] steward owned company in your governance structures?
Melanie Rieback: No, I was completely naive and I know very much about even social enterprise when I first started.
Jenny Stefanotti: Amazing. And so you set up that model and then you were able to run your company with the incentive structure that you we're looking for.
Melanie Rieback: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I also don't know how old even the steward ownership movement is, but I'm pretty sure that the TEDx that came out from Armin, from Purpose Foundation, I mean, it's probably older than 10 years, but not by much.
So, I think that, uh, you know, it was anyway, it's still pretty new. Yeah. But
Jenny Stefanotti: a steward owned label is new on, uh, business structures that have been around for a long time. It's marketing.
Melanie Rieback: Yes, but I think that, uh, steward ownership gets it partially right, but I think actually we even need to move a little bit further than steward ownership sometimes goes.
The thing is, the canonical definition of steward ownership is separating profit rights [00:08:00] from voting rights and making sure that if anyone is extracting out of the business that they won't have any. governance control over the operations of the company. So that's basically steward ownership in a nutshell.
However, for me personally, with post growth entrepreneurship, I prefer to actually take that one step further and actually to be able to basically get rid of the profit rights completely. So what you would actually do is you can take the profit rights and you can basically lock them in a foundation with foundation ownership, but foundation ownership by itself is not enough.
If you need any more. Evidence of this, look at OpenAI, there was no governance structure in place that prevented them from moving back to a toxic extractive business model. And that was the problem. Basically, what you actually really need is golden shares and locks like strong, asset locks, because that would have prevented OpenAI's mission drift.
Because a golden share, [00:09:00] for the listeners who don't already know what a golden share is, is basically a share of stock that contains voting rights, but no profit rights. And it serves as a kind of veto on certain governance operations for the holder.
Jenny Stefanotti: Right.
Melanie Rieback: So those governance operations can include things like mergers and acquisitions, dividends, sale of equity.
You could even add some extra additions like shutting down the company, sale of IP. That's not strictly required, but to really use golden shares to make financial non extractiveness in businesses, definitely M& A dividends and sale of equity are the minimum. I would say compensation caps are another nice addition, but the point here is that if open AI had had golden shares locking it down, then basically that sale of equity to Microsoft would have never happened.
And also now the way that the company is being restructured to make it basically for profit as a public benefit corporation, that also would not have happened if [00:10:00] a golden share had I
Jenny Stefanotti: appreciate that. So for listeners who aren't versed in steward ownership models, I would direct you to the episode on that and also the essentials summary.
But I think this is a really critical point because we've investigated this in detail, which is to say there are lots of ways that you can instantiate steward ownership, which is fundamentally defined by this decoupling of profit rights and control rights. However, Within those many ways that you can instantiate that in the governance a subset of that is this notion of a golden share where there's someone who truly can hold the entity accountable to profit being in service of purpose and open AI is, I think, an incredibly important example where they came out of the gate with a steward owned structure with a foundation, a nonprofit model, and you saw that that wasn't actually ironclad to prevent open AI from a slow and steady drift to the future.
a status quo business, more or less a [00:11:00] PBC is not quite a status quo business, but it's close. So Melanie's point is that it's really only the subset of the ways of instantiating steward ownership that truly gets you what you would define as a post growth company.
Melanie Rieback: Yeah. And in that sense, I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if people from purpose even have some regrets by now, you know, as defining basically foundation owned companies with nothing more as being steward owned.
I just, because of course I understand why they did it because before the movement existed, they wanted some historical examples to be able to get the ball rolling with the movement. And of course you've got tons of foundation owned companies in Europe, in Scandinavia, in Denmark, right? The only thing is they don't.
Withstand scrutiny because when you also consider the fact that, for example, E. K. is foundation owned. I mean, well, that's not a social enterprise. So in that sense, I mean, you need these golden shares.
Jenny Stefanotti: Well, let's bookmark that for later in the conversation around what that looks like. Cause we just took a unexpectedly wonky detour at the top of the [00:12:00] conversation, but I appreciate that.
Let me take us back to some basics. I often start my conversations with just clarity on definition. What is post growth entrepreneurship?
Melanie Rieback: So the way that I define it is basically companies with financially non extractive governance structures and the entrepreneurship that builds them. You can also have non extractive finance, which is also similarly building financially non extractive investment companies, also utilizing similar steward ownership combined with asset lock principles.
That to me really, I think, is the essence of post growth entrepreneurship. I've started thinking actually that the fact that I used the term post growth sometimes. Unfortunate because, uh, well, that's it. Yeah, that's, but look, I mean, when I started all of this, like six years ago or however long ago, it's been now, [00:13:00] I didn't know any of this at the beginning.
And I chose the term post growth because I wanted to, you know, be able to hitch my wagon onto an existing movement. Yeah. And, you know, basically the new economics movement with post growth, de growth, donut economics, it seemed, and still does, like a perfect macroeconomic framework for some of this quote unquote, you know, not for profit business stuff that I was doing intuitively.
But the problem though is the moment that I say post growth entrepreneurship, then people immediately think, Oh, growth, growth is bad. Like we can't have growth. We're supposed to limit our growth artificially, you know? I mean, That growth is not bad. It's really just a question of how you grow. Yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if sometime in the next year anyway, I probably pivot the name away from something like post growth entrepreneurship and in the direction of something like non extractive organizations.
Because I think that that really puts the
Jenny Stefanotti: fine line where I think it's an important nuance, because when I [00:14:00] started in this inquiry, I was holding this question of can we reform capitalism or is it fundamentally flawed? We can get clear on what we mean by capitalism, but my sense was capitalism was fundamentally flawed because of two things, which was the extraction incentive and the growth imperative.
So I think when you have the extraction incentive that dominates and the accumulation of wealth that dominates, There's a growth imperative. It's like growth is the objective function to enable that extraction, not growth that is done in alignment with purpose. So I appreciate that just getting clear around the extraction is really the place where the dominant economic paradigm breaks down for what we care about for the outcomes of the economy and its relationship to humanity and the planet.
You have mentioned before, business is one of the most effective forms of activism. So I want to dive into what you mean by that.
Melanie Rieback: Well, activists, you know, when we think of them, we tend to think of people with signs [00:15:00] outside of Shell's headquarters, you know, this kind of a thing, you know, extinction rebellion.
It most certainly is one kind of activist, but I think there's activists that can work outside the system and there's also activists that can work inside the system. And I think that it is sheer folly for activists to completely neglect business and finance within the scope of what they're doing.
Because business and finance are incredibly powerful tools for change. But of course, a lot of activists just write it off because they say, Oh, business is evil. I want nothing to do with it. You know, and I totally understand why they feel that way because oftentimes business very well can be evil, but you know, it's a tool.
It depends on how you hold it.
Jenny Stefanotti: Mm hmm.
Melanie Rieback: But it doesn't make any sense to allow our opponents, you know, to utilize business and finance for a lot of what they're doing. And then also to not embrace this [00:16:00] ourselves, because I mean, it's basically just putting us in a marginalized place that will be really difficult to recover from.
And we're seeing this now.
Jenny Stefanotti: Can you speak to how Post growth entrepreneurship fits into this broader conversation about systems change. You talk a lot about this in your courses, the so many amazing videos online. I'm excited to share them with the community that get into this, but you spoke to how the system needs to change and business as activism is a really critical leverage point for doing that.
So can you put, PGE into that broader conversation for us.
Melanie Rieback: Yeah, absolutely. So systems thinking, you know, typically I would think people would be referring to Daniella Meadows, of course, one of the initial authors of the limits to growth report from MIT and the club of Rome. She also wrote a good book called thinking and systems in a way she kind of considers systems to be a kind of.
state machine. And basically you can see the world as kind of like, you know, these, these interconnected graphs and then they have basically these junction points where they make [00:17:00] decisions. So either the system will take one branch or another branch. And there's usually a numerical weights that determine probabilistically if it will take one branch or the other branch.
Now these junction points are basically what she calls leverage points. One of the world's most frequent leverage points is financial incentives. This is precisely the reason why governments, if they want to stimulate certain kinds of behavior, they come up with different kinds of financial stimulus for companies to change.
They'll do things like give procurement benefits or subsidies or tax breaks because they're basically trying to change that value. Now, I think that really with, uh, Capitalism and the financial system really, as activists, if we want to be effective, it is a Easter egg hunt for leverage points because we really need to start paying attention to where we can have the greatest amount of impact with the smallest amount of effort.
And there are a number of leverage points that we can tackle. The first and most obvious one is corporate governance. [00:18:00] And financial extraction specifically, but I think that there also are others. So things like the compensation structures of venture capitalists is a leverage point. I mean, I think that also considering limited partners and institutional investors who are patronizing these.
fund managers for them just like even basic boring things like due diligence criteria and compliance requirements and diversification requirements. I mean those kinds of things basically determine whether that pension money is going to go to BlackRock or whether it's going to go to Triodos. And that is the kind of stuff where if you can make shifts in that, you're going to really start getting earthquakes down the line.
And I think one of the largest leverage points also is just the definition of fiduciary responsibility itself. We're supposed to be essentially maximizing the positive benefits for the shareholder, but okay, if you've got this 18 year old with a job and he's building up a small pension, shouldn't fiduciary [00:19:00] responsibility also be included?
Clue not screwing up the world that this 18-year-old is going to inherit. Mm-hmm. But is something that can be tested with lawsuits and can actually be shifted in the us. Maybe now is not the time for those lawsuits, but I think in Europe our courts are interesting, considerably more independent minded.
So I think that some of those kinds of lawsuits, uh, very well could succeed within the European context.
Jenny Stefanotti: That's really interesting. Yeah. So there's this kind of, the private sector is very rife with leverage points. for systemic change. Yeah,
Melanie Rieback: absolutely. And other things like the recruitment and selection of board members.
I mean, how is this happening? Who's responsible for it? What's the
Jenny Stefanotti: criteria? This whole matters. And one of the things that I appreciate you said in one of your lectures was just that this stuff is boring. And part of the reason why it's been able to be captured to the extent that it has is because it is boring and we turn our attention away from it.
But this is really where the change happens. I talk about how corporate governance is the sexiest thing that we talk about [00:20:00] on the podcast, even though the number one episode is consensual non monogamy. Number two is post growth economics with Donnie. I think another really important point that you make in your lectures is just that, you know, There is consumer demand for aligned consumption choices, but there isn't always consumer choice, right?
So entrepreneurs offering choice is also very important.
Melanie Rieback: That's it. I mean, we're basically on the supply side and, you know, I mean, we can go ahead and supply chain people, but do they actually have an alternative where they need to go quickly?
Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. And I think this is also, if we're thinking in systems and we think about leverage points where the demand side is there, but the supply side isn't there.
So there's a leverage point around consumption. So I want to talk a little bit about. Issues with the status quo that maybe people aren't thinking about it. I mean, I think you have a interesting perspective on what's the issue with the Silicon Valley model of entrepreneurship, capital scale exit. So can you speak to that?
Yeah, [00:21:00] sure.
Melanie Rieback: I mean, the Silicon Valley model of entrepreneurship, capital scale exit is everywhere. I mean, it started in Silicon Valley, but I mean, now it's in Europe, it's in Asia, it's in Australia, it's everywhere. And this is not really helpful because it's perpetuating income inequality everywhere. And of course, it's no coincidence anyway, also that, you Combinator had a really controversial blog post about how I am a manufacturer of income inequality.
And I basically. He wrote this, I mean, they know what they're doing, but the problem is this whole system has gotten perpetuated precisely because those who have the most capital have the largest financial interest to push this model. And you know, we don't consider often enough that things like startup incubators, very frequently they take equity in their startups.
Yeah. Right. Right. The incubators [00:22:00] themselves that are kind of masquerading as educational institutions for founders are actually investors, which basically means that they are financially incentivized for this portfolio company to grow exponentially and exits, you know, and one time I had wanted to actually give a talk on post growth entrepreneurship at a commercial incubator, and they turned me down because they said, no, one of our incubators Investors is an investment bank.
And honestly, we don't think they're going to like what you have to say. And I was offering to give this guest lecture to the founders free of charge. So to think that actually the financial incentive is so strong that they would turn down the offer of a free. Lecture for the founders on new forms of social enterprise because it runs in conflict with their own business model.
Nobody is talking about this and the problem is the marketing arm of all these people with capital is just so massive I mean if you consider some of these entrepreneurship conferences like slush and web summit, there's just so much Tons of them and they're huge [00:23:00] and it's very difficult I think to compete with a megaphone like that but I think we're starting to and certainly running incubators that are operating with different principles like with non profit ventures we educate about bootstrapping, flat growth and financial non extraction.
We also do place an emphasis on bootstrapping as well because most of the time if founders want to bootstrap and they go to a Standard startup incubator. It's not that they're left away, but it's more just that the incubator will look at them confused and just be like, but why would you want to do that?
Well,
Jenny Stefanotti: and we'll get into that in detail when we do the double click on post growth entrepreneurship. But first I want to stay on this topic of what's problematic about the status quo. But I think you also articulate well, issues with premature. Cost inflation before there's actually sustainable revenue and then having an exit even before the company itself is viable because, can you just articulate that because I think that's an important point.
Melanie Rieback: Yeah. I mean, the example that I use indeed in my videos is [00:24:00] just that comparing startups to factory farm chickens and they're sort of artificially force fed for three to five years to lead to their. point of liquidation when the financial value is pulled out, leaving a dysfunctional carcass of a company left over.
And this is counterproductive. First of all, because a lot of our startups also are attempting to be unicorns, but hyper growth is for most companies, not Sustainable because if you are trying to grow that quickly, you're probably hiring people at an extremely quick rate. And guess what? People are expensive.
People are usually the number one expenditure of companies. So your burn rate is just out of control. And most of the time the business from the customers, the revenue, Can't keep up with that. So, and of course, if you're trying to build a business, this kind of absolute lack of fiscal discipline makes no sense whatsoever.
And I think this hyper growth really is part of the reason why nine out of every 10 startups fail. And then also about the unicorns, they're trying to [00:25:00] become these unicorns, right? With companies with the one. billion U. S. dollar valuation or higher. But the problem though is that these unicorns also have a dirty secret and that actually 90 percent of them are bleeding cash and will never get in the black again.
Sometimes we ask ourselves the question of like, how is it that these companies that are losing so much money are actually. That they even still exist that they're even still on the market, you know, and then you kind of need to understand two things. I mean, first of all, they're just pretending to be in a particular industry.
Actually, their real business model is sale of equity. So their financial institutions, they're not actually making their living off of selling whatever product or service that, you know, they're claiming that they're actually in that industry. And this deforms the entire industry because then companies, which actually make livings off of selling those products and services, we have to compete with this because it's incredibly difficult to compete with companies that are losing cash, bleeding [00:26:00] it hand over.
You know, and they stay on the markets because of course if they're bleeding that much cash, they can afford to pay better. If they're bleeding that much cash, they can afford to make products cheaper in ways that are sustainable for ordinary businesses. And what this is, is this is basically monopoly forming by design.
And on top of that, if you ask the question with these unicorns of whose cash actually is it, you know, that these cash bleeding unicorns are spending, 85 percent of investment in VC funds, particularly in the U. S., come from pension funds. So they are spending our money.
Jenny Stefanotti: It's very well put. I appreciate that perspective.
I haven't heard it before. You also say it's about a vehicle for moving capital around, right, to your point. Well, let's talk about the issues with. social enterprise and impact investing as most of us know it, because I think that's a really critical point too.
Melanie Rieback: Yeah. So I mentioned earlier that, uh, the [00:27:00] compensation structures of fund managers is a leverage point and there's a reason for this.
And most people don't actually understand how VCs are created. are compensated. So most. Let's talk about it. Yeah. So most fund managers, in fact, most of the investment industry as a whole uses a model that's known as the two 20. So 2 percent asset under management fee, 20 percent carried interest. So what this means is I'll start with the carried interest.
If I'm a VC and you're my portfolio company, and then you grow exponentially and exit, I get 20 percent of that. So that is a really powerful motivator for me as a VC to push you to grow exponentially and exit. So you can say that that carried interest embeds the growth imperative into startups. So if you actually want to build these kinds of post growth companies that basically can thrive without having to grow, then you know, the way to do it is just to get rid of that 20 percent carried interest from the compensation structure of the fund manager.
Similarly, also [00:28:00] the 2 percent asset under management fee, it basically means if you're a pension fund, you would pay me 2 percent on my managing your money, regardless of how my investment performs. So, and you know, it doesn't matter whether it goes up, it goes down, you know, I basically live off of the fee stream.
It's not too extractive if you're a small fund manager, but if you're 1 billion us dollars or larger, it starts becoming extractive. And if you're BlackRock, you know, then it's ridiculous. So what I kind of like better is that there are some fund managers out there There that are starting to adopt alternative fee structures, and they're doing things like removing the carried interest from their fee structure or taking the 2% and changing it into the cost of running the business, assuming middle class salaries and a pension.
And on top of that, you could also use steward ownership with a golden share. also to, again, make your investment fund even more financially non extractive. And then what you do is you're basically eliminating the extraction above [00:29:00] middle class salaries and a pension in the direction of the fund manager, which then means that the investment decisions are made because the fund manager actually believes that it's the best decision, you know, for a best holistic outcome rather than just maximizing for their own personal financial interest.
Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. And so just to be clear, your point is that Impact investing retains this two and 20 model. So it fundamentally still has a very deeply embedded growth and extraction incentive. And so as such, it's really just greenwashing.
Melanie Rieback: Well, it depends. I mean, I think that some, uh, impact VCs, like for example, uh, Snowball Impact Management in London, also Purpose Ventures, you know, they're also structured as a steward owned co op, you know, are experimenting with this stuff.
So I think that there are some fund managers who are, you know, pioneering these kinds of non extractive governance structures for their funds. Of course, a lot of other impact [00:30:00] VCs are happy to extract. But the problem though is that a lot of them are getting stuck in a chasm around 20, 30 million because institutional investors will not touch them at the 10 foot pole.
And this is precisely because anything different is perceived as risky. And also the moment they start doing things like changing the compensation structures to eliminate the carried interest, for example, immediately the institutional investors will start screaming, you know, uh, incentive misalignment, which is completely bizarre because I mean, if you think about it, the greediest fund manager is not necessarily the best fund manager.
Plus on top of that, What on earth did they not like about low fees?
Jenny Stefanotti: You know, and
Melanie Rieback: just getting LPs, particularly institutional investors, to understand that not only is reforming structures in this way better for their bottom line because of low fees, but in fact, what they're doing is they are de risking the whole thing by eliminating LP and then between GP [00:31:00] and their portfolio companies.
So, I mean, hello, can you say better risk adjusted returns? Yeah. And this is how I think we need to be able to sell it. But this kind of noise, like is not making its way to institutional investors because they're extremely insular, you know, and they also tend to hang out also just with each other and voices like mine almost never make it into their circles.
Jenny Stefanotti: That's interesting. One of the first things that I investigated when we started this conversation, Over four years ago was capitalism and inequality and one of the things that was very eye opening was looking at the evolution of the American economy particularly in the 70s when there was an influx of capital from sovereign wealth from pensions and from university endowments that led to the rise of the money manager And it was that intermediary who was compensated based on return That also led to shorter and shorter time horizons and widening inequality and executives compensated based on [00:32:00] equity So it's very interesting to see you can honing in on the incentive of that financial intermediary
Melanie Rieback: Yeah, but wealth managers are for high net worth individuals, but we need to take our own responsibility as pensioners because the vast majority of the money that's getting invested is our money through our pension funds, through our insurance policies, through the contents of our bank account.
We, the people, we should have a say about what is happening with our money. And there's also an increasing number of solutions out there. Things like proxy pass through platforms like Broadridge is starting to have some facilities. Uh, so also the actual pensioners can vote about, for example, how do we want the proxy votes of our investment money to be used?
So, these kinds of things also really, I think,
Jenny Stefanotti: move
Melanie Rieback: the
Jenny Stefanotti: needle. I think it's interesting that as a systems strategist, you're honing in on these leverage points around corporate governance and the governance particularly of the financial sector. But as individuals, this conversation is also pointing to [00:33:00] a very high leverage point around where our money gets invested.
Melanie Rieback: But I think we can take inspiration also through tech platforms like the Iconic app that are basically allowing retail investors, basically people like you and me to be able to pick different profiles for the proxy votes with which our votes are being used for. So the way that it works is kind of like you can choose different platforms, like for example, as you so in Berkeley, California, they put together their own voting recommendations called as you vote that are extremely ESG friendly.
Yeah, it could. That maybe there's also a different slate of anti ESG pundits that might put together their own slate. But the point is it's a neutral platform, and at that point, you basically vote your values with just one click of the button. Right now, institutional investors have that ability with Broadridge and also.
Due to proxy advisors like institutional shareholder services and glass Lewis, but making this technologically easy also for the pensioners themselves and also for the retail investors. This kind of stuff is a game [00:34:00] changer. And again, this is a leverage point, but this actually requires entrepreneurship in building these platforms.
Jenny Stefanotti: Well, that's a perfect segue to getting into what this actually looks like for you because this is such a critical part of what you teach. So you talk about the counterpoint to capital scale and exit of the Silicon Valley model is the post growth equivalent, which is bootstrapping, flat growth and non extraction.
So let's talk about those in turn because bootstrapping I think is, is a really critical piece of this puzzle because what we've seen is that entrepreneurs who want to adopt these progressive governance structures often. falter when they are unable to attract capital.
Melanie Rieback: Yeah. And we're basically sold the lie that we need capital to start businesses.
Particularly if we are starting service based businesses, then there's no reason why we can't bootstrap. Product companies can be a bit harder, but we can also use services to bootstrap R& D on product. That's certainly [00:35:00] a way to do it. I've done that in my own company. Of course, you know, at a certain point, people always say, yes, but there's some things you can't bootstrap, you know, really capital intensive R and D, you know, and power plants, you can't bootstrap a power plant.
Right. And of course you can't bootstrap a power plant, but things like that are different because most of the time they are government funded. Funded. And then it really starts falling in a different category. One that is addressed quite well by the economist, Mariana Mazzucato, because she wrote a really wonderful book called the entrepreneurial state.
Well, she wrote a bunch of wonderful books, but I've got them on my bookshelf right here. Yeah, but the point is that her thesis is that basically the government is the world's largest VC, but we are socializing the costs and we're privatizing the benefits. Now I think in those particular cases, steward ownership with strong asset locks is the solution to this.
Because governments are always going to have fundamental academic research that they're going to want to launch. [00:36:00] But the problem, though, is when an academic has a solution and they want to valorize it, then they go to the TTO. The TTO probably points them to the academic What does TTO
Jenny Stefanotti: stand for?
Melanie Rieback: I'm sorry, Technology Transfer Office.
Okay. And they point them basically to the academic incubator, and then the academic incubator introduces them to some VCs. And then what happens is that the VCs come in at a relatively late stage of the game and then for a relatively small investment compared to the huge amount that the government put into the fundamental R& D of this stuff in the first place, basically the VCs wind up taking the majority of the project.
Profit rights and the voting rights. And this is the point when the costs have been socialized, the benefits get privatized, and we need to educate these technology transfer offices at universities to tell them how counterproductive this is. You know, they're also oftentimes trying to patent everything that moves.
I mean, what's the point of the government funding this kind of awesome research and development and all this innovation if we're just going to put [00:37:00] barriers to entry on people using it by patenting it? It makes no sense at all.
Jenny Stefanotti: So you're advocating for bootstrapping, which is essentially building the business without bringing in outside capital.
Melanie Rieback: Yeah. So bootstrapping when possible, reforming the venture capital industry for cases when it's not possible to make it financially non extractive and also for government projects where it's basically just a government saying, I want a school or a bridge or a road or academic research and ensuring that the.
companies that receive the contracts to carry out the work or the funds themselves that are holding the capital that was allocated by the government, that both of those are financially non extractive through their governance. Talk
Jenny Stefanotti: a little bit more about the bootstrapping point because I think it's important.
You speak a lot about lean startup and what Eric talks about in his book in terms of an approach. And you also talked about the distinction between a bootstrapping model and a venture capital injection as distinction between throwing a dart at a [00:38:00] dartboard and kind of honing in on the bullseye slowly.
So I'd love to have you just speak to that because I thought that was a powerful point.
Melanie Rieback: Yeah, the point that I was making with that is just that bootstrapping is a well established way to build companies. I mean, Lean Startup is the Bible of bootstrapping and every venture capitalist gives their founder in the startup a copy of the Lean Startup to read.
And the principle of course behind Lean Startup is you start with an MVP, you collect validated learning by selling something to somebody, you pivot to follow the pain in the market, and you iterate. Eventually, after enough iterations, you can add A B testing and whatnot, but that's essentially the essence of Lean Startup.
So that is bootstrapping. And even Eric Ries says in his book that it isn't helpful to start with a huge pile of capital and then to dump all of that into research and development. This is part of the reason why a lot of startups have such a huge product market [00:39:00] disconnect, which ultimately leads to nine out of every ten startups.
Startups failing. So bootstrapping helps to build resilient companies. It also helps to build ironically enough, competitive companies too, because when you start by laser focusing on your value proposition and your business model, it might take you a little while to find it, but once you find it, then you've sort of got this stable base and then you lock and then you can organically grow on top of that.
And really revenue snowballs, especially when you have happy repeat customers, you know, and before you know it, you've grown quite large, you know, and then you're a resilient company. Like with radically open security, we're bootstrapped. We organically grew to 50 people in the last 10 years. And in the same cybersecurity industry, there's a ton of other startups and a medium sized companies that were suffering when the interest rates went up, all these tech companies in Silicon Valley were laying off.
[00:40:00] Yeah.
Jenny Stefanotti: Interesting.
Melanie Rieback: But that's the thing. When you're financially stable and solid like that, it doesn't matter what happens to the interest rates because I have no debt.
Jenny Stefanotti: There's more resilience. Absolutely. And then you spoke a little bit to flat growth. Do you want to say anything more about that?
Melanie Rieback: Yeah. So, I mean, with flat growth, basically I generally tell the story that Kate Raworth describes in her book and in her TEDx video, which is very much a biomimicry story.
It's just, you have a tree and at the very beginning of its life, the tree grows really quickly, almost exponentially. But then at a certain point, the growth of that tree, it starts to flatten out. And then the tree stops growing and it starts thriving. And then if that tree wants to continue growing, well, it can't grow more because it's already reached its maximum size.
But what it does next is it drops seeds and those seeds become little trees. And then Kate Raworth asks the question, well, if [00:41:00] this is how nature does it. Then why is it any different with our businesses, right? And there's one thing in nature that grows exponentially forever and that is cancer and it's toxic to any ecosystem that it's living upon.
So why then does this inspire how we do business?
Jenny Stefanotti: Oh, I appreciate that. And then the third piece is non extraction, and we've talked about it at a high level, but I think we can double click on it to speak to that. Asset locks. What does that mean?
Melanie Rieback: It's basically ways to lock the value of the company inside the company.
And we're still figuring out how to do this collectively as a community, because the problem is the government does not generally provide financially non extractive business structures. I wish they did, but you know, the government are just not that far along yet and may or may not be in the near future.
So it basically means we need to kind of hack it together ourselves with the legal forms that are available to [00:42:00] us. And we're innovating. We're already trying to create asset locks by doing things like foundation ownership combined with golden shares. But I think we need to start being more precise also about exactly how we're implementing this.
Are we giving away one golden share or are we giving away a hundred golden shares, right? Because the way that I view this as a computer scientist is that this is basically a Byzantine generals problem. What this means is we need to consider how many people do you need to subvert to be able to break the system?
And if these golden shareholders are supposed to provide a reliable veto on whatever governance structures that you pre specified, then we need to make sure that that's not going to break. And the problem is if you only have one golden shareholder or two, then well, as a company, you could still. still collude with them, uh, to extract.
But, and that's why I prefer taking what I would call the Oprah Winfrey approach to golden shares. In other words, and you get a golden share and you get a golden share and you get a golden share, right? [00:43:00] Because it's hard to get a hundred people to collude, especially if some of them are ideologically extremely aligned with financial non extraction.
But right now there are no easy ways to give a whole hundred golden shares. whole group of people. I mean, right now I might be starting something soon to try and enable that to happen in a more easy way because the golden share holders that I know, typically lawyers will tell you, well, choose somebody you trust to hold your golden share.
But no, that's wrong because I should precisely be picking people I don't trust because it's the people I trust I'm most likely to collude with. And then there are golden share associations and foundations that are starting to hold golden shares, but they're charging like a thousand euros a year per golden share.
I mean, what? You know, I mean, if you're a founder, even for a company like mine, if I want a hundred golden shares, do the math. That's not going to work. So I think also like, you know, I'm thinking what would be nice would be to create some kind of company or a association or something that can [00:44:00] basically get golden shareholders and allow companies for extremely cheap, to be able to give golden shares to.
To mass numbers of, uh, golden shareholders. Just really to make sure that that asset lock is really an asset lock. And the other thing also is really standardizing. What does Golden share even mean? 'cause you also have like Tony Chuck alone who's sort of like, well, we have a mission lock, right? But then there's no veto powers whatsoever.
In their mission lock, right? So basically, if you disagree what Tony's is doing, you're allowed to write a newspaper article about it, or you're allowed to like, you know, submit an article to their, you know, whatever publication surrounding their AGM, that's nothing. So, you know, I'm sure they don't mean it badly, but I mean, it's basically kind of golden share washing.
And so we also need to really standardize what a golden share means. And we need to ensure a kind of quality control on what is a golden share actually for. And for me, I think the barrier is. They're minimum of what a golden share should do is be able to prevent mergers and [00:45:00] acquisitions, sale of equity and dividends.
Anything beyond that is sort of bells and whistles. Another thing also is that with most golden share agreements that, you know, will be suggested to founders, they include a whole bunch of extra clauses that then reach into the operations. And if it also, again, gets too big and too restrictive and too complicated, guess what's going to happen.
Founders won't want to use it, but I think the part where we're sort of building the While we're flying it, but it requires real acts of entrepreneurship to be able to settle these kinds of logistical, everyday problems with trying to actually set up the governance. And the other solution is trying to create entity forms, basically legal forms in different countries.
And Germany was really the leader with this one, in that they'd put up a petition, collected 2, 000 signatures, and then managed to get it into the coalition accord of Olaf Scholz. Sadly, the economics ministry had not yet implemented it, and of course now the German parliament fell, the cabinet fell. So I'm not totally sure [00:46:00] what's going to happen from here, their entity form initiative.
But in the Netherlands though, we were inspired by the Germans to also start her own steward ownership entity form initiative. And we put up our own petition, collected a thousand signatures. And we also managed to get it up for a vote, uh, also in our second chamber of parliament, and it also passed. So we're also right now in the Netherlands busy with drafting the legal text for a steward ownership legal form in the Netherlands.
And once that text is drafted, it can go up for a vote in our parliament. Other chamber of parliament, because we've also got House and the Senate. So we need to get it through both. And if that happens, then it can be implemented by the economics ministry. But the point is we need to get more of these kinds of initiatives happening across different EU member states, because if just one EU member state manages it, then we can passport it to the entire rest of the EU.
You
Jenny Stefanotti: know,
Melanie Rieback: on top of that, once we have it in the EU, then the rest of the world will start saying, Hey, what are they doing over there in Europe? And I think it would be really difficult right now in the States to do such a [00:47:00] thing. But the point is, if we can pioneer it, it'll also make it easier to also bring it into the States or Australia or Asia or other places as well.
Jenny Stefanotti: Right. So let me recap because there's a lot of really great things there that you just said. So just to be clear, post growth entrepreneurship is distinguished by bootstrapping. So do what you can to not have to get external investment so that you don't have a corruption of incentives that happens with that.
And we see how the dilution happened in the open AI and maps case. Or if you do take an investment, find an investor that doesn't have misaligned incentives based on their incentive structure, if you can. Flat growth. So you're growing with your revenue and so that your cost is actually covered through your revenue growth and bootstrapping and flat growth allows you to operate based on lean startup principles, be very close to the value proposition that you're actually creating for your customer to hone in on the successful business model versus The Silicon Valley default where there's this artificial inflation and growth in operations because of the [00:48:00] outside investment of capital before you actually have a viable business model.
So it's fundamentally much more risky. This is the throwing the dart at the dartboard versus the slow honing in on the bullseye that you have spoke to. And then this non extraction piece. I know you sort of got into the details around how you actually instantiate that. We spoke at the top of the conversation about steward ownership and the scope of steward owned instantiation options and how many of those are problematic.
And really, with the implementation of a Golden Share, that's where you're really deeply instantiating it. But even within the Golden Share conversation, there's a lot to talk about, which you just spoke to. And then finally, I think very critically, you're speaking to the need for an actual entity structure that captures this, that companies can adopt.
And I love that the work that you're doing in the Netherlands, well in Germany and now the Netherlands, was mirroring the work of B Labs with the movement around benefit corporations. So first there was the certification and then [00:49:00] they moved to do all the work in the U. S. around public benefit corps as a corporate entity.
And I'm particularly excited for what it's worth to contribute to the conversation around the, uh, Establishment of those types of entities, then in a policy level, it's easy to think about those types of entities as a subset of the economy, like a special economic zone where you can start to have preferential incentives or preferential treatment around procurement or taxes, taxes, a little bit.
less politically feasible, but it presents a very clear boundary within the economy that consumers, investors, employees, I mean, we're talking about the signaling value and information asymmetry. I think the adoptions of these corporate forms allow other actors in the economy to have a very clear understanding of where you actually mean what you speak versus that you're just signaling and greenwashing or whatever, washing, purpose washing.
So I, I just wanted to kind of restate all of that because it's so important. Well, I'm curious, we've talked about this a little bit, but the rubber really hits the road in implementation. So when we talk about non [00:50:00] extraction, there is still compensation to the actors who have engaged in the firm. So when we talk about employees and executives, what is fair compensation and the complexity of actually doing this?
You spoke about middle class salaries. You've also spoke about ratios of pay ratios to different employees, but can we talk about how this actually happens because this is a very complicated piece of the puzzle to actually say this is what seems like an appropriate compensation for me particularly in the context of What you're competing with To attract talent.
Yeah,
Melanie Rieback: absolutely. I find it extremely difficult to define fair compensation, just in part because it's extremely context and industry dependent and certainly geographically dependent. And also just because, well, there's so many different proposals. Of course, pay ratios is one, but you know, what exactly is fair compensation then?
It could be, [00:51:00] you know, 10 to 1. It could be 7 to 1. It could be 3 to 1. I mean, even 3 to 1 seems a bit excessive to me, you know, I mean, 1 to 1, maybe not, but I don't know. I mean, but the main thing is for me personally, I kind of attempted to solve it by paying myself roughly what I was earning at the bank back when I worked in their cyber crime team and then doing some inflation correction.
It's certainly not a perfect measure of what I'm worth on the market now, but the problem is if I try to do market conform with other CEO executives, most of them are paid in equity anyway. And once they cash out, the amount that they have is completely ridiculous. So, I mean, there is no way that I can realistically compete with that.
So I don't even try. My main thing really is just, is what I'm earning fair and reasonable and proportional compared to the other people in my company that are putting in almost equal amounts of work. And in that sense, I think any way. Compensation is a really difficult, tricky subject for founders as it's [00:52:00] really hard anyway, even when trying to pay middle class salaries on rates to people in your organization.
It's really tough to make the numbers work because people always think that they're worth more. And if you pay everybody what they think they're worth, then probably you'll go out of business. So in that sense, like also as a executive, sometimes I have notes. choice, but to push back against people's rate increase requests.
And that's really, really hard oftentimes their requests are completely legitimate. Like I just had a new baby or, Oh, inflation has been really bad. Like my groceries are more expensive. And they're always right. But at the same time, the financials of the company need to bear this. And oftentimes with companies, we are locked into framework contracts.
We're with our largest customers, which basically set our rates. And oftentimes, like I can't renegotiate it until the period is over and their RFC, that's the moment where I can increase the rates. But then of course, I'm also competing with other companies at that moment as part of the [00:53:00] RFP. So, I mean, it's really tricky.
I mean, fortunately right now, cause of inflation, all the companies in my industry are increasing their rates. So, I mean, most of the time it's not a problem, but it does mean though, that there's basically a lag, you know, cause between when I'm increasing my rates. For my staff versus when I'm increasing my rates with my customers, that depresses our cash, you know, and also just other usual cashflow things.
Like I might pay my consultants after 30 days and my customers might pay me after 60, some of them. And that puts a lot of demands on our cash. So, I mean, we need to basically juggle those kinds of things. And it's not always easy because we're dealing with humans. Occasionally people get upset when you push back against their pay increase.
It's just a very difficult thing and I don't think there is any one right answer. I just think though that if you're not financially incentivized to screw people over, you'll probably do the best that you can in balancing in a fair way. And that's sort of all I can really say. I mean, the last thing maybe is that in the Netherlands we also have a [00:54:00] concept that's known as the Balkan Norm, which Basically, Pieter Balkenende was one of our previous prime ministers in the Netherlands.
Jenny Stefanotti: And
Melanie Rieback: the Balkenende norm is basically saying that you shouldn't earn more than the prime minister of your country. And I believe that's roughly around 200, 000 euros. So that's an alternate sort of Netherlands specific measure of so called fair compensation. But whether or not 200k is reasonable and proportional, well, I think it depends because again, you have to look at what the other people are getting paid also in the industry to be able to decide.
So,
Jenny Stefanotti: yeah, I think the point that you made about not financially incentivized to screw people over, so not having a potential infinite upside is really important too. I think it's interesting to think about creative solutions like compensation caps, which you spoke to, right? Or even like you hit a threshold on a return if it's an investment.
So there's a lot of creative things that can be done there, but this is where the rubber really, really hits the road in answering these types of questions because I think it's also challenging because you're [00:55:00] competing within the dominant economic paradigm. So the opportunity costs for talent is also like people are willing to take a pay cut, but how much of a pay cut and what is the realistic cost of living?
I think RSF social finance does some really interesting things where they bring their investors. So people who put in capital into the notes that have their capital locked up from one to four years with explicit returns with their borrowers. It brings relationality into the business where you're really looking at, okay, what does feel like a fair compensation for my capital that goes in?
There's much more flexibility around, okay, yes, these are the original terms of the loan, but there was an economic shock and this is what it looks like and how do we renegotiate that? So it's interesting to think about just bringing together the factors of production and novel ways to have more resilience and fluidity in terms of things like that.
I'm curious about your thoughts on just the cultural component. Here, right? Because when we talk about making these kinds of compensation decisions relative to what's outside, I think there's a really important [00:56:00] cultural component, right? So the governance structures that we've been talking about, the golden shares, that's almost like the, the explicit things that we put in place.
that guide our behavior and our decisions, but the cultural component is such an important thing that sits on top of that, that just implicitly guides what we value and how we decision make. So I'm curious what your thoughts about culture are, both at the company level and at the societal level.
Melanie Rieback: Right. I think culture is relative in different parts of the world.
You're going to have extremely different cultures. I think also even in one single country, you're going to have people on different sides of the political spectrum. They're also going to have extremely different cultures. And I think in a way we need ways of being able to navigate. All of this, because I think if you have financial non extractiveness, then I think that the actual dominant culture of the group of people that you've gathered will reign, for better or for worse.
Ethics is also relative, because one group of people might [00:57:00] say abortion is murder and another group of people might say women have a right to do whatever they want with their bodies. And I think in the end, I mean, there is no objective. truth to that. There's sort of a relative group of people with a certain set of converging opinions.
And I think that it's sort of the same with, uh, with culture in a company. It's really highly dependent on the group of people that you gather. And I think we also need to be extremely careful also with our movement to not prescribe which culture that should be, because a lot of us that are into this stuff tend to be on the progressive left, thus saying that, Oh, but the only correct way to do this is with, uh, Uh, our progressive left values, well, I can tell you what happens as a result of this.
It means that when you have the beyond growth movement in EU parliament, it basically gets systematically shot down by the right wing politicians because they've labeled it woke. And then we're incredibly shocked that it's not able to go anywhere. I mean, this is precisely what we've been struggling with.
Now, in Europe, and [00:58:00] especially given the recent elections that we've had in the various countries, certainly in the United States, but also throughout the European Union, through most of the nation states, it is getting pretty right wing at this moment. And I think we need to understand that we can't do this by ourselves.
There are a few points of optimism and hope, though, that I've run into in the last year. The first one is that the whole concept of financial extraction, it turns out that that isn't a new thing. That's actually extremely old. Usury is actually a prohibition in all three Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
In Islam, they have these concepts called Islamic banking and Sharia finance. And what they're doing is the religious principle of this is it's trying to eliminate the predatory interest rates and the financial extraction from these kinds of financial products and institutions, thus to be [00:59:00] able to help move capital around without actively exploiting people.
And you have similar prohibitions also with Judaism and also similarly with Christianity. Also with Christianity, there's parables of Jesus and the money changers and how he flipped the tables in the temple district and chased the money lenders out of there. I've found that within Christianity, the whole concept of reducing financial amount extraction really resonates with good Christian values.
And I've had some really pleasant encounters with the economy of Francesco. which is basically a group of Catholic followers of the economic vision of Pope Francis. And what's really quite interesting is the economic vision of Pope Francis looks a whole lot like the progressive economic vision. Of course, there's still other contentious issues that we should avoid talking about with them.
Let's not talk about abortion. Let's not talk about GLBTQ, but if we actually focus on economics and wellbeing [01:00:00] economy and social enterprise, we are completely 100 percent aligned. And I think that there's a whole lot of room for victories that we can have by actually working together with those people who we would.
Generally considered to be opposing us. I was actually invited to teach at a one week Catholic summer school this past summer in Croatia. And I taught basically post growth entrepreneurship. I just talked about, uh, financial non extractive businesses and it just, Totally resonated. And what was even more interesting, I stayed for the rest of the week and they were also giving a whole lot of their own presentations.
And there is some amazing stuff in the scripture and also in the encyclicals of the various popes. Stuff about how capital is supposed to flow and not accumulate. And you can find this in their religious doctrine. If you look in the right places, so I think that also just as a post election message, which probably most of us don't want to hear, but I'm still going to [01:01:00] say is that I think we need to start overcoming the polarization because we don't have the political mandate to make these kinds of changes also politically.
that we want to. I mean, part of the reason why we got this steward ownership entity form initiative through politically in our second chamber of parliament is because it was picked up by a center left politician. Then it was co sponsored by basically a center right politician from one of the Christian parties.
And then a month later it went up for vote and then it passed. But if you would looked at who actually voted for it, it got the straight progressive vote. It got the straight. Christian vote. And somehow it even managed to get the farmers, the same farmers that were driving their tractors to The Hague to protest, uh, nitrogen.
And who voted against it was basically our neoliberal business party and our two extreme right parties, the anti Muslim ones. But the point was that even if we hadn't gotten the farmers, just Progressive plus Christian would have already been enough to win the day. And I think that this is a [01:02:00] lesson that the left needs to learn right now, that we need to start befriending the Christians and finding common ground with them, because if we work together, I think that will actually help us with creating solutions.
We need to make a bigger tent, things that can accommodate all of our values, because I think realistically speaking, this is the only way we're going to be able to move it all forward.
Jenny Stefanotti: Amazing. I'm so tempted to stop there. I just have one final question though. I think what you've just spoke to, I think touches on it largely, but I want to make sure you don't have anything else to add because we started the conversation with you elaborating on business as activism, but you also speak to business as spirituality.
You've already pointed to a lot of the monotheistic religions, how the scriptures talk about ethical alignment with post growth entrepreneurship as you're describing it, but can you speak a little bit more fully to what you talk about when you talk about business as spirituality?
Melanie Rieback: I think that different [01:03:00] people do have different religious values and I think that it can be a way of expressing yourself and your own spirituality, whatever form that might happen to take.
Generally, the way that I say it is business as activism, business as spirituality, business as mixed media for art. And this is another one that's not very obvious to people. But art, of course, is a way of getting people to see the world in a different fashion. And why couldn't you do that with finance, right?
Finally, business as a means of creative expression, you know, just understanding that each of us as an entrepreneur is on a hero's journey and it's up to us to write that script with our actions, not our words, you know, and it's up to us whether or not, uh, this will become a story of success. Tragedy and greed or of basically something heroic where we can make things better.
Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm. Amazing. So inspiring. Thank you so much for the work that you do and for honing in so finely [01:04:00] on what it really, really, really looks like to instantiate business in alignment with. the future that we want for life on this planet. So thank you so much for the work that you're doing. It's very exciting, not just the education and the incubator, but also on the policy side, you're a shining example of what it looks like to truly put all of these pieces together in one place, but also be strategic and thinking about the intervention points and leverage points that you can enact.
So it's just a real pleasure to bring you on and introduce you and your work to the community.
Melanie Rieback: Thank you. But the good part is any of us can do this. I mean, first you just need to understand the system and then you can use your own specific talents and insights to take this work further, right? I just so happen to use cybersecurity as a form of activism and afterwards to use my entrepreneurial experience as a tech CEO as a form of activism, but anyone can do this in any area that they're in.
It's just a matter of really understanding the nature [01:05:00] of the problem and then applying it to your own special skills and abilities. But, that being said, I think it does help to educate yourself first and for those of you who find this conversation interesting and would like to know more, I have a series of videos on YouTube.
They're recordings of the post growth entrepreneurship class at the University of Amsterdam Business School that I taught. And it is eight videos and roughly eleven hours of content. I know it's a long sit, but if you really want to understand the methodology, it's all in there. So, uh. It's
Jenny Stefanotti: well worth it.
I really enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it. Yeah. It puts so much together. So I will share that out in the show notes and on the newsletter too. Yeah.
Melanie Rieback: And the last thing is, I would also invite you guys to take that content and interact with it. And another thing we're doing with Nonprofit Ventures, also this upcoming year and also last year as we were recording.
Personal experience stories of people and how their own lives intersected with post growth entrepreneurship. And already there's some examples [01:06:00] publicly on the nonprofit ventures, YouTube channel of people who are giving sort of mini talks, taking PGE and translating it into their own lives, into their own context.
You know, I put this class out there now, right? I mean, this is my. Story. These are my insights, but it can't just be the Melanie show. It has to be a choir. It has to be all of us. So what I would also invite you all to do is basically to record your own video of a half hour, talking about your own experiences with the Silicon Valley model and what you ran up against and some of the things you tried and how you solve problems.
Because talking before about culture and about context, right? I can only present things from the angle that I'm coming from, which is basically an American living in the Netherlands with a tech background. But I think if we have people in different countries or in different industries or with other different cultures, I mean, it is precisely you who can provide that translation layer of the PGE material into your own context.
context in a way that I would [01:07:00] never be able to start with. And I think this is also super important.
Jenny Stefanotti: Thank you for that invitation. I'm very excited to get this out to everyone soon. All right. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to Scott Hansen, also known as Tycho for our musical signature.
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We share announcements from them in our newsletter as well. Finally, this podcast is made possible by support from the Denizen community and listeners like you. Denizen's content will always be free, offering Denizen as a gift models, a relational rather than a transactional economy, enabling Denizen to embody the change that we talk about on this podcast through the reciprocity of listeners like you, that we were able to continue producing this content.
You can support us or learn more about our gift model on our website. Again that's www. becomingdenizen. com. Thanks again for listening and I hope you'll join us next time.