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This paper was prepared for the Patricia Kelso Symposium on Procida, hosted by the Kelso Institute Europe under the leadership of Jens Lowitzsch — a gathering of ~16 invited participants on stakeholder ownership, exit-to-community strategies, consumer-owned renewables, and AI's opportunities and risks. (Context in Ashish's LinkedIn post.) It is the academic companion to our earlier essay Building Community in the Age of AI: The Future of The Grid — a more rigorous, steelman treatment of why we believe The Grid should evolve into a platform cooperative, and how to reconcile that with venture-scale returns. We are publishing it here in full, with only light reformatting for the web.
The Approach: This paper presents a steelman argument for implementing platform cooperative structure for The Grid, Zolidar's foundational knowledge infrastructure. Rather than ideological advocacy, we build the strongest possible case given real constraints: venture capital requires scalable returns, community platforms face cold start challenges, and AI products need superior data quality for moats.
Zolidar's Context: We are building the easy button for employee ownership with a mission to increase the wealth of everyday Americans. The crisis is massive: 3 million businesses face succession challenges as owners approach retirement. When these owners try to sell, 80% fail to find outside buyers due to M&A market constraints. Employee ownership (EO) solves this by offering liquidity to owners at fair market prices while creating wealth-building opportunities for employees. This represents a market opportunity 5 times larger than traditional M&A, but only if we can overcome the complexity that has trapped this potential for decades. Our AI-powered platform will guide stakeholders through every step of EO transitions — from building owner conviction to structuring deals to post-transition success. By turning months-long ordeals into guided journeys, this will empower experts to save far more businesses. The Grid serves as our knowledge infrastructure, powering superior AI capabilities across all our products.
The EO Ecosystem Challenge: Building superior AI capabilities requires addressing fundamental challenges in the EO ecosystem. Information is fragmented and outdated, blocking adoption and slowing transitions. Expert practitioners struggle to find each other and match with clients, while also lacking effective ways to build reputation. Newcomers face high barriers to entering the field. Community networking, learning, and knowledge sharing are constrained to individual experiences or conferences that attract the same practitioners repeatedly. Critical knowledge exists in silos — locked in individual consultants' experience, scattered across disconnected resources, or buried in complex regulatory documents. This fragmented knowledge landscape creates a barrier: without comprehensive, current data, AI products cannot deliver the insights needed to guide EO transitions effectively. Better AI tools would help practitioners serve more clients efficiently, enable business owners to navigate transitions with confidence, and ultimately scale EO adoption across the broader economy.
The Grid as EO Infrastructure: The Grid addresses these challenges by creating a knowledge graph where practitioners can connect, showcase their expertise, learn from each other, and collaboratively curate content. We would structure this as a Platform Cooperative where community members earn ownership through contributions, creating a cycle: better community engagement generates higher-quality data, which powers superior AI capabilities, which attracts more users to Zolidar products, which drives more value back to The Grid.
The Business Model: We aim to balance Zolidar's venture returns with community ownership through two layers: Zolidar monetizes through SaaS products while The Grid operates as an open, community-owned knowledge base. We believe this could drive stakeholder alignment while building a moat for Zolidar. Below, we explore the specific revenue streams, how community ownership creates competitive advantages, and the open questions we're still working through to make this model sustainable.
Current State and Path Forward: The Grid is already a public platform with wiki-like collaborative editing, and we have invested significantly in curating data about the EO ecosystem. To realize the platform cooperative vision, we need dedicated capital for legal framework development, technical infrastructure for ownership tracking, and community governance systems. We are actively seeking partnerships with experts, organizations, and impact investors who share our vision. Success depends on transitioning to a model where practitioners earn ownership stakes through contributions.
We believe this creates a self-perpetuating flywheel where Zolidar helps scale the EO market and creates a successful, long-lasting business doing so.
The EO ecosystem operates in silos, where each grant-funded or place-based initiative treats its work as a standalone project rather than building cumulative knowledge that could accelerate future efforts, and where current operating models pull practitioners toward larger businesses while smaller businesses — those at greatest risk of shutdown with far fewer succession options — remain underserved.
Picture this: A regional advocacy organization excels at building grassroots relationships and running community programs, but spends six months creating a static website that treats technology as an afterthought rather than leveraging interactive tools that could multiply their program impact. The owner of a 15-employee educational consulting firm commits to employee ownership but spends months struggling to assemble her deal team — not knowing how much to pay advisors, which specialists she actually needs, or how to evaluate their expertise. Halfway through the transition, her attorney retires unexpectedly, forcing her to start the search process over while the clock ticks and costs mount. During a webinar on open-book management, dozens of business owners share breakthrough insights in the chat about implementing financial literacy programs, but those conversations vanish when the session ends. Meanwhile, academic research filled with valuable insights sits locked in journals that practitioners never read, referenced only by other academics.
Organizations pour energy into reinventing technology solutions instead of focusing on what they do best — the relationship-building and program delivery that actually transforms communities. Instead of five organizations each improving their own version of "Introduction to Employee Ownership," imagine if all that effort went into perfecting one reusable resource that everyone could build upon. Opportunities slip away while the expertise to unlock them remains disconnected.
This fragmentation persists because maintaining current information requires collective knowledge from practitioners in the field. Advisor specializations shift, firms merge, regulations evolve, and best practices develop across geographies, industries, business sizes, and EO types. These changes happen at a scale and speed that no single organization can capture, forcing practitioners to either catch up on knowledge that others have developed or make decisions based on incomplete information.
The AI era makes this problem urgent. Data quality now differentiates superior products from generic ones. Without comprehensive, current data, AI products cannot deliver the insights needed to guide EO transitions effectively.
Without shared infrastructure for knowledge accumulation, the ecosystem cannot scale to serve the businesses that could benefit from EO transitions.
The solution lies in flipping the traditional platform model: instead of a single organization trying to capture and maintain all this information, we enable the community to own and curate the infrastructure collectively. This approach has proven successful at massive scale.
Google Maps demonstrates what community contributions can achieve. When Google launched MapMaker in Pakistan with very limited seed data, the community mapped the majority of the country within weeks. Individual corrections benefit millions — a single coffee shop location fix from me in New Orleans subsequently helped 2 million users. Google couldn't employ people to maintain this data; it's not about cost, it's logistically impossible. Contributors derived clear value from these platforms — better navigation for themselves and pride in helping others. The open source software movement similarly reimagined business models around community contribution. Android's strategy — free, open-source platform with monetization through services — demonstrates how superior products emerge through community contribution while generating venture-returns.
However, community expectations around value sharing have evolved. Early platforms like Reddit and Stack Overflow thrived because contributors gained professional reputation, problem-solving assistance, and networking opportunities while platforms provided infrastructure. The value exchange felt acceptable because contributors received tangible benefits. The dynamic shifted as platforms began licensing user-generated content to AI companies. Contributors became upset when they found their discussions and answers generating new commercial revenue streams they weren't participating in.
This highlights why aligned incentives matter from the start — ensuring the community that builds valuable resources shares in whatever value emerges, without needing to predict exactly how that value will be derived. Direct transactional approaches fail because individual contributions have infinitesimally small value, making micro-payments impractical. The most effective approach combines immediate non-monetary benefits with long-term ownership that accrues as the platform grows.
This is where The Grid's platform cooperative approach provides a solution. The Grid structures information through core primitives: People (advisors, business owners, experts), Organizations (firms, nonprofits, government agencies), Answers (solutions to common questions), Glossary (standardized definitions), and Content (reports, videos, podcasts). These primitives connect through relationships — linking advisors to the organizations they work with, content they've created, and questions they've answered.
This structure enables powerful extensions. Consider market comparable valuations for M&A transactions, which currently exist across numerous fragmented databases with inconsistent data quality. These databases are sold at premium prices by companies who source the underlying transaction data from the broader community of brokers and advisors. The Grid could add Transactions as a new primitive, allowing practitioners to contribute deal details directly. When an advisor completes any M&A transaction, they input transaction data — company size, industry, valuation multiples, deal structure — creating a comprehensive, community-verified database that replaces fragmented sources. Contributors earn ownership stakes through their participation, creating both immediate value through better tools and networking opportunities, plus long-term returns as the platform grows.
Zolidar creates value at every stage of the EO journey. Our business model centers on three revenue streams that scale with business size: SaaS subscriptions for AI-powered tools, take rates on arranging financing for successful transitions, and ongoing services for operating EO businesses. Our current products — Day Zero Guide, Aha Planner, and Zolid AI — establish the foundation for expanding into agentic AI workflows that automate transition processes and administrative tasks. (For a complementary framing of Zolidar's role as ecosystem infrastructure rather than a single product, see The Easy Button for Employee Ownership: How Do We Build It?)
The Grid would operate as community-owned data infrastructure powering these products. Community members would earn ownership stakes through contributions, creating aligned incentives where platform success benefits contributors financially. The specific mechanisms for wealth sharing — whether through profit distribution, liquidity events, or other approaches — remain open questions as we explore legal frameworks and structures.
This dual structure addresses the scaling challenge: maintaining data quality across a changing ecosystem. Community ownership transforms data collection from an ongoing cost into an asset that strengthens over time, enabling superior products that create customer retention through utility.
Open Questions We're Exploring: What legal frameworks best support community ownership while protecting business continuity — option pools, cooperative structures, or alternative approaches? How do we sequence ownership distribution to align with contribution value and platform growth? What mechanisms ensure wealth distribution to community members while maintaining operational control? These questions will shape our implementation approach and partnership strategy.
We seek collaboration across several areas. Legal practitioners with experience in cooperative structures, option pools, and hybrid ownership models could help us navigate frameworks that enable community wealth sharing while protecting business operations. Community builders who have successfully launched contributor-owned platforms could share insights on incentive design and participation mechanics. Impact investors interested in ventures that demonstrate returns alongside community wealth creation could help us refine funding approaches.
Academic institutions and nonprofit organizations building EO knowledge repositories could explore partnership opportunities — transforming into stakeholders who earn ownership through contributions. Technical experts in platform cooperatives and community-driven development could help us implement infrastructure for ownership tracking and wealth distribution.
Success with The Grid could create a template for technology companies seeking alternatives to traditional models, demonstrating how venture-backed companies can achieve community ownership while delivering superior products and returns.
If this resonates and you'd like to collaborate, get in touch. For the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of this work, see the companion essay Building Community in the Age of AI: The Future of The Grid; for the broader argument that EO needs infrastructure rather than a new product, see The Easy Button for Employee Ownership: How Do We Build It?.
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