New Stripes for Zebras Unite
By: Jennifer, Mara, Astrid
Tags: Startup, Cooperatives, Zebrasunite

Cooperate on the future we want. Create a fund. Go to camp.

This great image was made for Zebras Unite by Sarah Nason https://sarahnason.myportfolio.com/

We honor Valentine’s Day each year with a major update. It’s because this work to create a better future for values-aligned founders is fueled by a fierce love and urgency for connection.

In 2016 we were broken-hearted, unable to find the right match between the companies we were creating and startup culture’s status quo. We sent the bat signal for others who also felt alone. In 2017 we articulated the ethos for the kind of companies and world we were eager to create. We hosted the first ever convening, DazzleCon. In 2018 we shared the joy and relief of finding kindred Zebras who have since built chapters all over the world. In 2019, others began talking about Zebras in earnest (in the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, Non-Profit Quarterly, PC Magazine and The New Yorker, among others). We raised some funding, partnered with Village Capital, and set about building a new type of organization. [If you are new to all things zebra, you might enjoy this short history of Zebras Unite].

Before we jump into the exciting developments and announcements for 2020, first: some reflections.

We’ve learned some hard lessons this last year. Many of you have asked: what is Zebras Unite up to? How can I plug in? What are the next steps for building this community and momentum?

We’ve struggled to answer these questions. We found ourselves trying to do too much, with too few resources, and in an unintentionally centralized way. We’re on year four of a small group of people doing this work on nights and weekends, managing our own zebra companies, families, and lives. Meanwhile, the culture we wish to change has only intensified since we first started.

We see that with each day, the Zebra ethos and brand grows more relevant and urgent. The world is noticing. Zebras around the world have expanded their footprint and serve their local founder and investor communities. Take our friends in Germany, who are promoting a New Mittelstand, purposeful small and medium sized business as the new foundation for economic development; our friends in Scotland, who are running regular lunch labs to shape the economic future of their country post-Brexit; and individuals and groups organizing meetups and chapters from Melbourne to Minnesota, and from Toronto to Tokyo, to name but a few.

These are exactly the kinds of activities the world needs more of, and that we want to support. In 2020, we’re creating the structures to do so. We’ve been deep in legal complexity, developing a framework that is aligned with the future we all envision: one that’s co-operative, decentralized, and provides room for necessary ambiguity.

This work has been possible thanks to collaboration with so many of you, who have helped us find aligned and innovative lawyers, funders, and movement builders. This is essential, difficult work to design a structure where no perfect one exists to support the multi-dimensional, emergent nature of this endeavor.

Zebras Unite’s Success is YOUR Success: Creating a Co-Op

For the last year we’ve searched for an appropriate corporate form for Zebras Unite that would serve our purpose and values, and help us become a resilient, scalable movement. Would we become a US-registered nonprofit organization and plead for grants and donations? Would we become a Delaware C-Corp and pivot to software (joking!)? The message we kept hearing from so many of you was loud and clear: you want to build this movement WITH US, where the organization’s success is YOUR success. And so: Zebras Unite will officially become a COOPERATIVE later this spring.

What is the benefit of a cooperative? Well, it means that members will own shares of Zebras Unite. As we grow, you get dividends. This aligns incentives, decentralizes and democratizes decision making, and is an inclusive structure that allows everyone to join the journey.

Filling a Capital Gap for Founders of a Different Stripe: Launching the Zebra Fund

We also heard that you are in urgent need of capital. We have been working, together with Village Capital, to develop a taxonomy of the diverse suite of innovative capital instruments that are emerging and that are providing alternatives to venture. We are working with a group of inclusive loan funds on creating shared infrastructure for mobilizing services and capital for underserved communities in the US. We found ourselves in conversations with potential investors to buy Meetup, and developed a roadmap for turning this and other distressed unicorn assets into examples of “exiting to community”. We partnered with Wefunder and Indie.vc to experiment with referrals for Zebra companies. And we helped shape the content for a number of gatherings on innovative, inclusive capital.

All this has brought home to us the need to create our own capital, and so we’re in the process of creating a Zebra fund, managed by the co-op’s first commercial venture, Zebras Unite Capital, a joint venture with SecondMuse Capital. We are partnering with SecondMuse Capital, a leader in the application of blended capital to develop inclusive and sustainable economies, because of their track record and aligned values. Zebras Unite Capital will be an inclusive, integrated investment company helping solve the startup capital problem by creating a distributed infrastructure for raising and deploying capital to startups, with an initial focus on underrepresented founders. The fund will offer both affordable debt and equity. As we invest in Zebra co-op members, profits are returned to the co-op, and its members.

We’ll have more to say about the fund later this spring, and have been so inspired by the work of capital innovators like Adobe Capital, Collab Capital, Founders First Capital, Indie.vc, Purpose, Wefunder, Village Capital, and so many others working to increase the range of options available to founders. We look forward to working in partnership with these and other aligned investors to advance the innovative, inclusive capital ecosystem that benefits founders of all different stripes.

Finally, we’ll also have a non-profit organization that will continue to provide education and awareness around the business culture we wish to see, one that advances the ideas that have drawn so many of you to the movement: cooperation, collaboration, sustainability, and multi-stakeholder prosperity. We can think of no better time to advance and explore these ideas, in light of last year’s announcement by Business Roundtable that fundamentally redefined the purpose of a corporation.

Building the Future We Want, Together: Come to DazzleCamp!

Between May 19–22, 2020, we’re gathering at DazzleCamp, outside of Atlanta, Georgia. It’s a one-of-a-kind gathering, convening a diverse group of entrepreneurs, investors, and operators around business, capital, community, and culture. And the attendees? In addition to working with us to design the co-op and fund, you’ll be invited to be the first, early Zebra co-op Members.

We’re looking for people who want to build this next phase of Zebras Unite together. The ideal DazzleCampers are:

Post-revenue founders that align with the Zebras Unite ethos and are looking for more aligned capital, corporate structure, and culture;

Zebra-aligned or Zebra-curious investors looking at new ways to deploy capital;

Zebra service providers, thinkers and doers who can help us practically apply the ideas to new capital funding and corporate structures, as well as be a resource to zebra-identifying entrepreneurs;

Active participants eager to co-create the event experience with all of us; and

Diverse in terms of geography, demographics and sectors, coming from across the world.

DazzleCamp won’t have many “sages on the stage” and keynote presentations. Instead, this will be a dynamic, interactive, strategic gathering with a variety of programming.

If you’re interested in building the future of Zebras Unite and the future of business, together, go to DazzleCamp and tell us a little bit about yourself, and how you would like to contribute to the event, to make it useful, purposeful and delightful for everyone.

Every week between now and DazzleCamp, we’ll be profiling one of our Camp partners or chapters who are pushing change forward and will be bringing their solutions to the group.

Whether you join us in May or not, we know we cannot build this new future alone. Find us online, and join our mailing list to stay tuned for more regular updates on the co-op, the fund, and the educational opportunities.

DAZZLE ON!

PS: The next global Zebra gathering will be outside the US. We’re already looking for chapters and others who’ll step up to host the next gathering in ’21 or ’22. Reach out!