[nickpinkston]

I'm very sympathetic to cooperatives, have traveled/know the Mondragon people (largest coop federation), etc.

However, I think there's a reason why coops seem to succeed at smaller scales, but there are essentially no large innovative coops.

There are a few large boring coops, and some small innovative ones, but seemingly something is making the CEO/investor board model the one large innovative companies are all using.

I suspect that it's both (1) access to capital is far harder for coops, and (2) that workplace democracy and hardcore mission focus aren't fully compatible. That is, "you cannot serve two masters" without losing focus on one of them.

[marcosdumay]

If a company accumulates capital, it becomes vulnerable to the principal agent problem, and coops are way more vulnerable here than centralized companies.

If a company doesn't accumulate capital, it doesn't scale in complexity. It can grow by having more people do more of the same things, but it can't move into markets that demand anything complex.

[dartharva]

Coops can definitely succeed and even dominate at large scales with some minimum government protections. The largest dairy producer in the world is a coop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul

[mplanchard]

This seems hard to tease out from the fact that a) the majority of companies do not survive, b) the large, large majority of companies that do survive do not wind up being large or innovative, and c) there are far fewer coops than regular companies. If you assume equal chance of success between them, you’d still see vanishingly small numbers of large, innovative coops, because a small percentage of a small number is small.