We all know the issues. Our attention has been exploited. Creators are left out of the wealth created by platforms they enrich. We’ve lost our sense of truth. Our conversation is broken.

This isn’t working for us. It’s time to flip over the tables.

I’d like to introduce you to Collective, an app, a company, and a philosophy that we think is a modest solution to an increasingly urgent problem.

We, as creators, deserve a platform that puts us in control, not just of the content, but of the business model, and the company itself.

For the past two decades, a handful of people have been made fantastically wealthy from the content posted by a global community of creators. The founders and VC’s behind these platforms have little in common with the community that creates the content, yet the wealth, as always, is concentrated at the top.

You are invited to join us in flipping the old model.

1. We’ve built a platform that benefits both the creator and their community. When you host on Collective, you are showing your content while enabling your community to connect with each other — they will meet new people, have meaningful live conversations, and hopefully come out of the experience a little better off than how they came in.
2. We’ve designed a business model that benefits the creator first. Instead of selling ads, we support the creator in earning an income. If the creator is successful, then we are too. Our fates are aligned.
3. We will be a steward-owned, public benefit corporation. Here’s where it gets interesting: we are codifying our mission within our corporate governance, giving you, the creators, a seat at the table when it comes to key decisions regarding the future of the platform.

The social Internet is in crisis. We don’t have all the answers. But we do have an approach that we think is worth a try.

First, a little on who we are and why we are doing this.

My name is William Etundi Jr., I’m a creator, a producer, and a technologist. I’ve been producing large-scale creative events for the past two decades that mix spectacle with intimacy and a particular view of social uplift that comes when people get together. Additionally, in 2012, I founded an artist network that scaled to over one million members. With Collective, I’m looking to combine my experience with live events and technology platforms into one product that might just help push the Internet forward.

I’m also a creator of color who has personally felt the sting of the current power structure and the unseen limitations that exist for people like me. With Collective, I want to change that.

My partner, Julian Darwall, is a civil rights lawyer who now represents creators, with a focus on deepening community. He brings his legal insight and product mindset to a deeply personal mission of amplifying diverse voices.

To get the platform started we’ve developed an initial creator pool that sees their audience as peers — creators who have a deep respect for the attention of their community. With this small team and a thousand private-invite-members, we’ve spent our quarantine developing a prototype of a platform that attempts to meet the challenges of the current social Internet.

We are calling it Collective. And this article is your invitation to get involved.

The idea here is simple. People attend gatherings for two reasons, be it a performance, a show, a film premiere, a talk, or a meditation. You come for the content, and also to connect meaningfully with new people.

Collective is a platform built on connecting people directly with each other for live conversation while experiencing the content from the host. It’s like a venue for any kind of event, for anyone in the world, at any time. And we’ve designed it to be beautifully simple.

So far, our beta-test group has attended dozens of events and entered into thousands of conversations. What’s been most gratifying, are the new relationships, collaborations, and connections that have been formed.

Our product vision is simple: we make the social experience primary.

Our goal with the business is to build a platform that benefits our community of creators, not advertisers. This keeps everyone aligned. Great content is created, communities are served, and if it all works well, the creators make money, and then we do too.

The way it works is this:

1. You create an event on Collective.
2. You invite your community to join.
3. During the show, people contribute, and you immediately get paid.

When contributions are made, we add a small fee, just like a ticketing company, while you, the creator, keep all the dollars contributed. For example, if you receive a $7 donation, we add 91 cents on top of that, to cover the cost of operating the platform (10%) and the transaction costs (3%).

That’s it. It’s pretty simple.

Having an equitable product and business model is great, but all that can go out the window without the corporate governance to back it up.

This is where we are doing something that we think is truly exciting. Collective is structured as a steward-owned public-benefit corporation.

This means two things:

1. As a public benefit corporation, we are putting our mission, to support creators and connect communities, ahead of profits. It’s a new corporate model that has been getting a lot of traction.

2. We are also structuring under a steward-ownership model. Our community of creators will collectively have one of three voting steward shares. This means that any sale of the company will be voted on by our community of creators, alongside our team and board.

It’s a unique structure that we are excited to advance. We won’t get everything right, but we are committed to learning along the way and being as transparent as possible.

For more on steward ownership and why it’s so important click here.

The Internet is the greatest advancement of human connection in history. However, over the past several years, the human part of “human connection” has been lost — eaten by the algorithm and the quest for profit that powers it.

We aim to put humanity back into the social Internet— in the way we connect, in the way we see each other, in the way we support each other, and in the fundamentals of how a business is run.

We won’t be perfect. We will make mistakes. But if you’d like to join us on this journey, please get in touch.

sincerely,

Collective is more than a name. It’s a core philosophy. With that, we are going to share in the ownership as well.

The earliest active creators on the platform will have equity participation in the company. This means that you’ll get stock compensation like an owner: as the company’s value increases, you benefit. This is the core idea behind Collective: we are in partnership with you, our creator community.

To claim your spot, click here to sign-up to receive more information.