Less than 1% of startups secure venture capital funding. At Limeleaf, we're part of that 99% – but by choice.
Since founding our company, a few people have asked how we plan to fund product development. Most assume we'll try to raise VC money. Today, we'll explain why we aren’t taking that approach and what we’re doing instead.
• Company
This morning, Blain educated me about the history of the .io top-level domain. I didn't know that history when I bought limeleaf.net last year before teaming up with Blain and Erik.
limeleaf.net wasn't available then, but to my surprise and delight, it was this morning, so I bought it.
All Limeleaf site traffic and email now redirect from limeleaf.io to limeleaf.net, and I have donated $50 to Chagossian Voices.
Worker cooperatives ("co-ops") are a growing alternative to traditional hierarchical tech company structures, which often rely on venture capital funding. Unlike conventional startups that take VC money in exchange for an equity stake, co-ops prioritize worker ownership, democratic decision-making, and profit sharing and strive to embody the 7 Cooperative Principles established by the International Co-operative Alliance.
Go is a popular language choice for building web services. Typically, when
building those web services, we end up encoding/decoding JSON as the
data format. The encoding/json package provides a safe way to turn
JSON payloads into Go structs, and vice versa.
However, if we need to
handle raw []byte that follow a binary encoding format that
is not self-describing, we need to do a bit more work and
implement the encoding.BinaryMarshaler and encoding.BinaryUnmarshaler
directly. Since we're dealing with []byte, we need to respect slice
bounds to avoid triggering a panic() and crashing our service.
Let's look at the two ways we can decode data into Go structs and compare how one way will be safer than the other while yielding the same result. As an added bonus, we'll end up with easier to understand code.
When we started Limeleaf, we wanted to do things differently. We wanted to create a democratically managed business where every worker had a voice and a stake in the company's success. In short, we wanted to start a worker cooperative (even though we don’t call ourselves that, for reasons we covered in Part 1).
In this second installment of our series on starting a tech company as a cooperative business, we’ll discuss how we wrote our Operating Agreement (OA).
At Limeleaf, how we do our work is equally important as the work itself. As we explained in a previous post, Limeleaf operates as a worker cooperative, and we are dedicated to embodying the Seven Cooperative Principles.
Cooperatives have gotten a bad rap over the years. They’ve been portrayed as impractical, plagued by decision paralysis, and insufferably hippy-dippy.