Aspen Policy Academy

Support for Worker-Led Startups

By Trevor Pels

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 policy brief 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 start-up accelerators to begin targeting a portion of each batch for companies structured in this way.

View the Brief