Purpose Trust is a legal structure for global platform companies.
As an alternative to the Delaware C Corp, it’s designed for businesses where rent extraction is less viable than creating value in and for the underlying assets - for example real estate, ride hailing, or farming.
Its cooperative core leads to better decision making, while retaining the benefits of growth, swift decisions, and standardized operations across geographies. This is not without precedent: the world's largest fund manager, Vanguard, is run in a similar way, as are many other successful companies.
The three core principles are:
Sovereign
The Trust owns itself with a fiduciary duty to purpose and the local asset owners it provides services to. No rent extraction, no outside shareholders, no exit expectation.
Co-Determination
Labor, capital, and trustees have a carefully balanced equal say, with all three constituents forming the board, with veto powers, and labor being elected through unionization.
Subsidiarity
Maximise decision making and value creation on the local level without sacrificing functioning governance, with services and not authority flowing from the top down.
The modern economy is a marvel that brought us more than just the iPhone. But over-financialization and the hunt for extractive yields made capitalism not even work for many capitalists anymore. We need to be in this together again and re-align incentives.
As we rebuild, we need to rebuild trust in our institutions, ourselves, and each other.