Gaessaki

Mainly debt instruments (loans, lines of credit, etc.) and occasionally preferred shares.

Quebec probably has the single best cooperative financing ecosystem in the world (1B+$). There’s a need for more risk-driven investment instruments in the sector however to seed early stage ventures. Most of the funds end up getting reinvested in existing cooperatives who can already access traditional funding.

Welp, there goes another SaaS platform in our corporate ops toolchain. Anyone have a recommendation for a tool to handle the cap table for an early-stage cooperative with several hundred members that won’t cost us an arm and a leg? Excel?

This was a fundamental question for me before taking the plunge into starting a coop. Long story short, I did a lot of research and there wasn’t anything that really compensated risk in early stage startups hence the dearth of platform coops.

We ended up structuring our coop to have equity split from voting rights to allow employees to have ESOPs and investors to invest as they do in traditional corporation minus their control of the board. In theory we would be able to IPO down the line, and perhaps become the first coop to do so without demutualizing or a separate investment vehicle on the side.

Our coop took part in start.coop. Open to answering questions from anyone interested in starting a cooperative startup!

This is good feedback though, as I had the same issues. It shows the value of launching and iterating quickly with user feedback, rather than building in the dark in the guise of perfection.

Managing the dispatch of our delivery drivers and monitoring our infra over the holidays.

Wish there was some way to bond with others that are on-call while being on-call. It’s lonely with the rest of the company being away. I guess this thread is a close as we get.

Best of luck to you and anyone else with generator fires and Happy Holidays to all!

Our venture-backed cooperative startup board has 1/3rd of its seats reserved for its employees, which incorporates both corporate staff (devs, marketing, etc) and operational staff (drivers, support).

The other 2/3rds are divided equally between our restaurant and consumer members. Each member class votes exclusively for their portion of the board seats.

We’re nearing year three, and this arrangement has been working well for us. We’ll see if it can continue to scale as we expand geographically.

IMHO as someone who participated in a lot of these non-equity corporate accelerators, both as a startup and as part of the technical teams supporting the initiatives (at two different companies), it’s primarily cheap PR for both the parent company and the startups. There are some perks like the product and service credits as well as the opportunity to network with relevant teams at ParentCo, but I find the experience hardly comparable to a more traditional accelerator like YC. It’s a question of incentives.

If your partner has the bandwidth, I would consider applying for the perks, but I would be mindful of getting distracted by things that don’t entail building product/solving the core problem and selling to clients.

Send me an email (bio), organizing something with a couple of others!

Send me an email (in bio) and I’ll schedule a time!

Shoot moi un courriel (bio) et je m’occupe du doodle !

Montréal, anyone? :)

Didn't mean to imply that they were necessarily doing anything wrong or right (and I tried to clarify that with the last sentence of my post).

In my book, "taking down a notch" means to humble someone. Companies like Apple and Google can make uniliteral decisions that move markets (for better or for worse), in a way that other companies can't. The crux of the question is whether they'll be able to hold onto this liberty.

On the same vein, I think it's totally fair to ask whether a non-tech company like Nestlé could be taken down a notch.

All that being said, I buy your point. As long as their core offerings remain undisrupted/maintained, it's hard to envision things being different.

I could include another dozen or companies that I would target in this question. FAANG is simply a stand-in. I guess we could go with GAMA instead.

It seems like Stripe has an article on how to migrate data to their platform without business interruption on their site. I would imagine others would have similar instructions available.

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/account/data-migrations/pan-import

Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister.

No longer doing consulting, but found it invaluable as a tech person building a consulting team and trying to break into enterprise. Probably useful for any professional consulting through a firm (lawyers, accountants, big 4, etc.)

Someone mentioned Designing Data Intensive Applications which I’m partial to as well.

Thanks for the tips. We’ve implemented some of these measures already and it has helped. We’ve had phone verification from day one for example. we try to balance the opportunity cost when possible.

For example, we lose a lot of potential clients due to them being turned off by the phone verification, though we rationalize that by saying that the support and operational costs are a lot lower this way as the driver can get in touch with the clients should there be any issues.

I think the next steps as you outlined are to build additional flows for fraudulent users and regularly verifying some heuristics on our data. We’ve haven’t gotten there yet due to it not being that pressing, but it’s clear we’ll need to do so as we keep gaining traction.

I’ll definitely keep your contact in hand when we visit this issue further!

That’s an incredible margin. Is this gross before paying out drivers or after?

The suggestion for a local payment processor is a good one. We have another processing entity here in Canada called Interac whose fees are considerably cheaper, though consumers don’t reap the benefits of credit since it’s debit.

I’ve also read about Uber’s efforts accepting cash payments which I found to be very interesting: https://www.uber.com/en-EE/blog/india-growth-cash-payments/

That’s what I would have thought… Not to mention that with the in-person data we have from our drivers that other online merchants don’t, they would be able to sus out entire networks.

I don’t know if it would materially affect the individual offender. Lot of them are actually just teenagers. And the time cost for us would not be insignificant.

That being said, if there was a way we could signal to all the would-be-offenders that we took prior cases to court, that could be quite worthwhile.

We’ve had phone verification since day one. We’ve left the secondary verification stuff up to Stripe, maybe that’s the next place to look.

To be fair, the card fraud is not driving the business into the ground per se, just more annoying when it happens :) solving the problem is more of an opportunity cost thing for us

This begets the question, why present a backend demo to a non-technical audience?

Almost every time I’ve done this, the tech part was glossed over as the audience assumed I was presenting in good faith. Usually, the business needs garner a lot more discussion time.

If you’re doing some sort of sales or fundraising pitch, isn’t it worth mocking up a minimal UI?

Reminds me of an old Joel Spolsky post: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/02/13/the-iceberg-secret...

Card testers are so frustrating to deal with. We run a food delivery platform coop that processes orders and then delivers them on behalf of our restaurant members. We’re an ideal card-testing target for the perps before they hit up the Apple store. Only basic anti-fraud measures because we’re a startup and as a reward, free meal if they find a card that works.

The hit is usually doubly painful for us as we not only lose the money, and get the 15$ Stripe dispute fee, but we’re still on the hook for the restaurant’s food and driver’s tip and need to pay that out of pocket, and we also lose valuable time from our drivers. So all in all, a 50$ fraud might cost us 80$.

The signs are always obvious. Always ~70$ orders. Asking for the food to be delivered to a person across the street. Obviously fraudulent names and emails. Postal codes from elsewhere in the province. Orders from only certain restaurants. The problem, we always catch this too late through manual reviews. The restaurant usually has the food made before we find out.

Despite mitigations, blocking blocks of addresses (digital and physical), Radar, etc. it’s still trivial to get around and make fraudulent orders if you’re able to constantly acquire a fresh supply of new cards. We can probably build more sophisticated detection mechanisms, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

We’ve resorted to just cancelling the order quietly once we find out, without informing the fraudster. When they invariably call an hour later inquiring about their delivery (with a voice totally not matching the name), we either tell them we’re sending cops or cuss them out loudly. The silver lining is that it’s fun to witness their reactions on the phone when they realize they’ve been caught.

The banks and police are no help. There are obvious fraud patterns (we’ve physically seen the crooks and know where they live) and we have compelling evidence we can provide, but they won’t do anything. Understandably, they’re fighting the problem at a much greater scale and probably don’t have time for small peanut cases like ours, but it’s still frustrating nonetheless.

In some ways, it can be better than lidar. The colour signal can be perfectly matched with the depth signal to provide further context. This is particularly useful for tracking moving objects. Vision-based systems also have a far greater resolution, especially when additional cameras are added.

But having both would be best. The drawbacks of camera are additional compute being necessary for stitching and the risk of occlusions occurring due to something like adverse weather conditions. It also only offers a calculated estimation rather than a true distance measurement.

Archived: https://archive.ph/enXkn

Spot-on and reflects the reality I’ve been living for the past two years.

I’d qualify both scenarios as being competitive, though arguably the Ben and Jerry’s one is likely easier for the “average” person to break into with a cooperative.

While the capital requirements are relatively lower to start a food processing business, they’re not non-existent. The founders will have to pony up most of the initial investment and take on a whole lot of risk early on, with only a very slim possibility of a large payout if the venture does exceedingly well. Most financial institutions (even cooperative ones) won’t lend to them, as it’s difficult to collateralize the initial equity put forth by the founders of a cooperative. Equity can’t be issued to investors, due to governance and legal restrictions. The capital pool is thus dramatically constrained vis-à-vis a traditional corporation.

This is ignoring that cooperatives are harder to start in most jurisdictions due to a lack of legal resources. Our food delivery cooperative took 7 months and several letters and in-person meetings to legally incorporate (even though we started sales one month in) whereas our local competitors who formed corporations were able to incorporate within one day and online. During the early months of the pandemic, we actually had to get a derogation from the government to be the first cooperative in Canada to have our founding general assembly (a legal requirement to start a cooperative in Quebec) online, as the law said we all to physically meet in person to be able to incorporate!

The very legal framework for cooperatives see much less use in most jurisdictions, meaning that when things go wrong, the venues for recourse are unclear due to a lack of precedent. A notable case of this is the hijacking/bankruptcy of Mountain Equipment Co-op in Vancouver, Canada, which was sold off to private equity without the consent of its members, all while following the law to the letter.

Contrast this with starting a corporation, where the financing and governance playbook is known and if you want to bring in more people onto the team, you can just continue subdividing the equity to get something akin to a cooperative. A cooperative is just a corporation after all, just with a more equitable equity split.

I think what you’re suggesting can still work in certain cultural and economic environments. The founders really have to sell the idea of buying into their cooperative, all while limiting their potential upside as they bring in members who have yet to contribute to the cooperative and yet will soon be eligible to take part in the proceeds and governance. If they can manage that and get over the initial legal and financial hurdles, they can totally be competitive. The initial constraints don’t make it attractive however.

I think this sort of thing is nigh impossible to do these days in most parts of the world. If you look at most major cooperatives around the world, almost all of them were founded at least 60-70 years ago if not further out.

The primary challenge imo is the mass financialization of the global economy, which makes it a lot more enticing to start a traditional corporation over a cooperative. Cooperative regulations in most jurisdictions make it very difficult to raise equity and even restrict many types of debt. There’s more coordination overhead, at least initially, and once mature, most cooperatives tend to look like public companies governance-wise anyway.

It just doesn’t make sense for the average person to start their own cooperative, especially in any competitive domain. The risk-to-reward ratio is totally skewed towards the wrong direction. It’s like starting a union for a non-existing company.

I say all this as an avid cooperatist who has been working in the space for the last six years and who runs a cooperative startup in Quebec, arguably one of the strongest coop ecosystems in the world. If the stars didn’t align for us (e.g. strong technical team, ample personal funds, prior cooperative experience, market timing, etc.), there’s no way we’d be surviving two years in.

I think if you had a link in your profile, you could have probably reached half that number by now. Just look at all the comments!

In my case, most of the early adoption for my products have been through in-person interactions. Both B2B and B2C. I’m not sure what your product is, but to take a gander, I’d probably just ask friends who worked in startup or corporate jobs if I could stop by their office and show off what I was working on. Then I’d probably offer a trial to anyone who showed interest while I was there and offer to extend their trial if they find friends or colleagues who were interested in trying it out themselves. If you have a bit a flywheel effect through that, then you know you’re on to something.