Jesse Thorn's Signature Signoff: Maximum Fun's transition to employee ownership

I've been podcasting since the dawn of podcasting. So about 20 years with Maxwell fun. I always wanted something that would sustain my creative work and the creative work of my pals. Like I knew that what we wanted was to have jobs making something, not just gigs making something. I always knew like if I sell I got to sell to somebody I want to work for and it's hard to find them. And I thought, well, do I want to work for my fellow workers? Yeah, you bet I do. I like these people. And I called my father-in-law who uh works and worked until very recently at an employee owned hardware store in the Bay Area and I said, "Steve, is there a way out of this? do I have to have meetings with investment bankers? And he said, "Find somebody who can help you look into employee ownership." So for me, it started with a web search. I I I may have literally Googled what be employee ownership and I I called emailed Project Equity. He connected with the folks at Project Equity um as a way of figuring out a way that he could no longer own the business, but it could also continue set up around the values that he had established for the company and protecting the people who he worked with, you know, who he still works with to today. What we're looking for here is legacy. We're looking to futureproof that business so it's able to continue to maintain those systems not just for the next cycle of ownership like 5 years, 20 years but even generationally. So we talked through what kind of employee ownership might work and then I brought it to our managing director, our top executive. He was excited about it and so uh we eventually had a meeting. We got everybody together and we said, "We have something really important to tell you." There's part of me that thought, "Oh, something very big is happening." And then I thought, "Are we are people losing their jobs? Is Jesse selling the company and then we're going to lose our jobs or we're going to radically change what this place is all about?" I thought the most likely scenario was that Jesse was selling the company. And Jesse said, "I want to sell the company, but I want to sell it to you." I was right, kind of, but not in the way I was expecting. I was very intrigued. um a little like you know just it was a lot to take in all at once. Everybody was so motivated to do this special thing and seeing him talk about this idea of you know making maxf fun worker owned and selling to us. Seeing his excitement um was cool. This is an ethical way for him to get what he needed to do to, you know, keep his life in order and for us to have a cool opportunity to kind of have some equity in what we're doing. The great thing about working with David and Project Equity was having it broken down a little bit. You know, it's it's comforting to have somebody who's done this before. We haven't done it before, but Project Equity has done it before. And so having that resource to bring it down to bite size helped a lot. So what's unique in a worker co-op is that each individual that is an employee has an opportunity to become a member. There's control reward and there's risk. Part of the reward is being able to be involved in the decision-m being able to have an opportunity to run for the board of directors. So when the board and the outgoing board members announced that it was time to elect some new board members to the board of directors, they put out a call to the co-op and said, "Here's an opportunity to, you know, throw your hat in the ring." That was an immediate place where I was like, "This is the way. This is the way that I can make a difference." we have found a way that um allowed me to meet my goal also to sustain this thing that was my life's work in a way that I felt honored the values that created it right and that's a big deal that's a hard thing to find and I'm really really happy that I did I'm a worker owner now too like I didn't leave [Music] [Applause] Just remember, all great radio hosts have a signature sign off.