This paper was prepared for the Patricia Kelso Symposium on Procida, hosted by Kelso Institute Europe under the leadership of Jens Lowitzsch. Context in Ashish's LinkedIn post.
Three million U.S. businesses face succession challenges, but 80% fail to find outside buyers — employee ownership is a 5x larger opportunity than traditional M&A, blocked by fragmented, stale knowledge. This paper argues that The Grid, Zolidar's knowledge graph for the EO ecosystem, should evolve into a platform cooperative where practitioners earn ownership through contributions.
It works through the real constraints venture capital, cold-start community dynamics, and AI data moats place on the design. Google Maps and Android show what community-curated platforms can achieve at scale; Reddit and Stack Overflow show how that model breaks when contributors stop sharing in the upside their work creates.
The proposed structure is dual-layer: Zolidar monetizes through SaaS subscriptions, financing take rates, and ongoing services for EO businesses; The Grid operates as open, community-owned knowledge infrastructure that powers those products. Contributors earn ownership stakes, which compound into a data moat that powers superior AI, which attracts more users, which drives value back to the community. Open legal, governance, and wealth-distribution questions remain — and the paper closes with a call for collaborators across legal, community-building, impact investing, academic, and technical domains.
Full paper: https://zolidar.com/blog/grid-as-community-owned-infrastructure-for-employee-ownership