employee-ownership
(11)
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.
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.
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.
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.