employee-ownership
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Hamdi Ulukaya Bought the Factory Everyone Else Had Finished With
A junk-mail advertisement led him to a silent yogurt plant in upstate New York. What followed became a food company and a stubborn argument that factories, workers and newcomers deserve another look.
The Lobbying Firm That Put Its Employees Inside the Venn Diagram
Venn Strategies sells access, policy fluency and persuasion. Then its founder made an unusually literal bet on alignment: she gave the people doing the work a stake in the firm.
Stephanie Silverman Built a Washington Firm - Then Gave Its People a Stake
The founder of Venn Strategies spent decades arguing that workers should share in the companies they build. Then she made the argument personal.
Stephanie Crockett Spent 19 Years Learning the Agency. Then It Became Everyone’s Business.
After nearly two decades inside Mower, Stephanie Crockett inherited a founder’s chair and an employee-owned future. Her method is less corporate theatre than candor, community and the steady work of earning trust.
Gaiax wants its employees to outgrow the company
The Tokyo startup studio lets teams turn their departments into independent businesses. Its next experiment asks what happens when those businesses share more of what they know.
EML changed its name. Then it changed who owned it.
The electronics PR specialist became Wildfire, traded press-cutting piles for campaigns with commercial aims, and put the business into employee ownership. Its history is a lesson in knowing what to keep.
Mike Francis Is Turning a Garage Experiment Into Infrastructure Armor
The NanoTech Materials CEO went from programming a calculator he meant to use for cheating to building ceramic coatings for roofs, bridges and industrial plants. His harder invention may be a company where every employee gets to think like an owner.
Dan Kenary Bet the Brewery on the People Who Built It
Harpoon began as three friends chasing the local beer culture they had found in Europe. Nearly four decades later, Kenary's most revealing product is not an IPA but a durable idea: let the people doing the work own the future.
Todd Kaufman Built a Software Company That Its Employees Could Own
A sixth-grade encounter with BASIC led to a career in code, a roadside Chili’s led to Test Double, and a stubborn question about fairness led its founders to give the company to its employees.
Isaac Baker Is Making Solar Work for the Buildings the Market Forgot
The Boston founder built Resonant Energy around a stubborn idea: clean power should lower costs for nonprofits and affordable housing, not wait for the easiest roof and richest owner.
Harpoon Bet $70 Million on Its Workers. Then the Beer Market Changed.
Harpoon used a leveraged employee buyout to keep a beloved Boston brewer independent. A decade later, consolidation forced a second experiment: share the machinery, protect the local brands and make the taproom matter as much as the six-pack.
Connor Rouan Is Turning the Ceiling Into an Energy Dashboard
The SiteWorx CEO learned the business from installation sites upward. Now he is betting that the most useful climate technology may be the kind a facility manager can see, measure and switch off.
The Firm Buying Back America's Factory Floor - Then Handing It to the Workers
Two brothers watched private equity buy their father's factory and shut it down. Their answer was to build a manufacturing group that ends with the employees owning the whole thing.
The Holding Company That Never Plans to Sell
OwnersEdge buys healthy companies, folds their employees into one diversified ownership plan, and keeps the exit door shut. Its wager is that patient capital, shared services and a stake for the people doing the work can turn succession planning into a durable growth model.
The $200 Million Water-Bottle Company Built to Give Its Profits Away
Simple Modern entered a crowded aisle with $200,000, an Amazon playbook and a promise to give away at least 10% of its profits. A decade later, its cups sit in more than 10,000 storefronts - and the mission is still written into the math.
How KKR Outgrew the Deal That Made It Infamous
The firm once synonymous with a single giant buyout now manages $796 billion across investments and insurance. Its real product is no longer the deal - it is a system for finding, financing and improving assets at global scale.
Victory Capital
How a management buyout out of a Cleveland bank turned into a $300-billion-plus asset manager that collects boutiques the way other firms collect logos.
Qapita
Qapita is a Singapore-headquartered equity management platform that helps private and public companies, startups and investment funds run their cap tables, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), valuations, fundraising, liquidity events and fund administration in one system. Founded in 2019 by a banker-investor-technologist trio, it serves over 2,400 private companies and 100+ listed companies across India, Southeast Asia and now the US, managing more than $55B in equity for over 500,000 stakeholders.
Firebrand Artisan Breads
Firebrand Artisan Breads is an Oakland-founded, Alameda-based wood-fired bakery that describes itself as a jobs program that happens to sell bread. Founded in 2008 by Matt Kreutz, it wholesales artisan breads and pastries to hundreds of Bay Area retailers - including Whole Foods - and runs a direct retail cafe. Its defining feature is an Open Hiring model that prioritizes people with high barriers to employment (formerly incarcerated, formerly homeless), paired with a perpetual purpose trust that locks the mission in permanently and shares profits with workers.
Eric Foster
Eric Foster spent 42 years at Swinerton - one of the largest 100% employee-owned construction companies in the US - rising from project engineer in 1982 to CEO in January 2020, the company's 12th chief executive in its 132-year history. A UC Berkeley civil engineering graduate, he led Swinerton through the COVID-19 pandemic, oversaw the launch of mass timber subsidiary Timberlab, and expanded the firm to $4.3 billion in revenue across 20 locations before retiring on January 11, 2024. His career touched landmark San Francisco structures including SFMOMA and the historic Monadnock Building.
Mandy Cabot
Mandy Cabot co-founded Dansko in 1990 from the back of a station wagon and built it into a $140M comfort footwear empire - then gave the whole company to her employees. Now she's running Silk Grass Farms in Belize, a vertically integrated agribusiness sitting atop 24,500 acres of protected rainforest. Chapter three of an already remarkable life.