The Future of Equity: Notes from Palo Alto
Last month I presented at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing's fourth annual Silicon Valley symposium, "The Future of Equity." One question kept coming up: as AI reshapes how value gets created, who is going to own it?
There is no other room in the country quite like this one. The Rutgers Institute puts 250+ Fellows and practitioners in a hotel in Palo Alto. ESOP practitioners sit next to startup equity administrators. Co-op researchers trade notes with people from Carta and Fidelity. The ESOP world and the stock-option world don’t always talk to each other, and they use different vocabulary for the same underlying idea.
Still, the scale of employee ownership is bigger than most people realize. Over 25 million American employees hold some form of equity in their employer. In the information and communications sector alone, 40% hold company stock and 30% hold options.
What I presented
My paper, "The Modern Yeoman?: AI, Micro-Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Business Ownership," started with Sam Altman's prediction that the future of startups could be one person and 10,000 GPUs. But I asked a different question. What if we aimed AI enablement not at would-be unicorns, but at a broad base of micro-entrepreneurs?
Two ideas from it have stuck with me since, and both bear directly on the work we do at ownAI.
First: take the AI away. Does the business still exist, and who owns what's left?
In one model, core value lives in the technology. The AI is the product. Take it away and little remains; value concentrates in the platform. In the other, core value lives in the human (craft, expertise, relationships, reputation) and AI runs the back office. Take the AI away and the baker still bakes. Both models can scale. Only one is secure against the platform changing its terms.
Second: access alone isn't enough.
Fewer than half of Homestead Act claims ever "proved up,” meaning that would-be farmers needed more than free land to succeed. Without capital, equipment, or know-how, the homesteaders couldn’t meet the Act’s requirements to hold and farm the land for five years. Compare that to the experiences of the Rural Electrification Administration, which bundled loans with engineering support, "utilization experts," and cooperatives it financed. Nearly all loans were repaid and electrification drove significant growth.
If you've ever watched an organization buy AI licenses for everyone and then wonder why nothing changed, you already know this lesson. Distributing access to a powerful asset frequently fails. Bundling access with capital, training, and institutions is what works. That's the whole thesis of our practice, discovered a century earlier with electricity.
AI was everywhere at this conference
What struck me was that AI wasn't confined to one panel. It came up over lunch, both informally and with a great presentation by our colleague Aaron Dean. Katie Deal and Julien Rosenbloom from the Lafayette Square Institute also did a terrific presentation on employee ownership’s potential for mediating AI’s effects on labor (a favorite topic of ours at ownAI).
And employee-owned companies come to this moment with an advantage most firms have to manufacture: employees who benefit when productivity rises, job security that makes experimentation safe, and a culture that already treats frontline judgment as valuable. Those end up being the the conditions AI adoption requires. Ownership isn't just a fairness story here. It's an adoption strategy.
At ownAI, we help employee-owned and mission-driven organizations turn AI access into actual capability. Let's talk.