Business governance — LLC, C-Corp, Co-Op…. sounds boring as hell. But is it?
Instead of setting up a traditional partnership or agency, Anna and Janel of Strange Birds did something different — they spent a year building out the governance structure of a worker-owned cooperative.
Anna has been running Strange Birds, an idea specialist consultancy for over six years; Janel joined two and a half years ago after leaving Meta — and instead of just adding a second name to the partnership agreement, they restructured the whole business as a worker-owned co-op.
We dig into what a cooperative actually is and why it’s meaningfully different from a standard partnership, what the business case actually looks like (the survival stats are genuinely wild), and how going through the process forced them to have all the money, roles, and “what if someone stops pulling their weight” conversations that most business partners quietly avoid.
What a worker-owned cooperative actually is — and how it’s legally different from a regular partnership or LLC
Why 90%+ of co-ops outlast the 10-year mark while most traditional businesses fail within five
The personal case for co-ops: why the creative services agency model is broken and what a democratic ownership structure actually fixes
Equal pay, dependents, and the specific messy money conversation they had to have before finalizing their bylaws
Why the cooperative legal structure took them a year to formalize — and why that’s a feature, not a bug
How defining clear roles replaced the “we should all be interchangeable” model and made both partners more confident and effective
What “humans first” looks like in practice when a kidney infection takes someone out for a month
The structural safety nets they built into their bylaws for future members
How practicing difficult internal conversations has made them better communicators with clients
Keeping a 20-year friendship intact when you’re also co-running a business together — and the early warning sign when things start to feel tense
A cooperative model helps make sure we're all not just quote unquote horizontal — which, for people who have worked in horizontal business models, be real: was it actually horizontal? It was not. There was always a boss. Always a boss. There's always someone saying no. This is actually democratic. We all own it. We're all invested in it, and we all get paid equally regardless of if one person's services are bringing in more money — because a rising tide lifts truly all ships in a cooperative."
About our Guests
Mentioned Resources
Lauren Edwards Flying the Coop episode
