Aspen Policy Academy

Support for Worker-Led Startups

Many Silicon Valley founders want to create technology companies that remain values-focused over the long-term. Unfortunately, this vision is often compromised due to pressures from institutional finance to return quick profits. This project recommends an alternative structure, where board-level decisions are made democratically by a company’s workers through the formation of a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) to make governance simple, and calls for startup accelerators to begin targeting a portion of each batch for companies structured in this way.

Click right to view various resources for navigating worker-led startups using DAOs, including a website with resources for workers, founders, and investors and a policy brief explaining the process of creating a DAO.

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