An equitable company - Roomy<br>Roomy<br>An equitable company<br>decentralized networking is best realized with decentralized ownership<br>Erlend Sogge Heggen
July 08, 2026
4 1
ALT
'Still Life 2' by parumaruu
Following from musings on Open Source Power and Company as a Commons, next we can look at labor-protective licensing and democratic company structures can complement an open and equitable social contract of fair compensation for product maintainers and investors alike.<br>Table of Contents:<br>1.<br>Seed Money - my mini-exit as an early employee of Discourse.
2.<br>The Deal - for Roomy contributors.
3.<br>Outstanding Debts - to Roomy contributors.
I want to show you what I think ought to be a perfectly normal social contract between multiple different stakeholders of an open source or otherwise open software project.<br>This social contract lays the preliminary foundation for a signable legal document in the event that a (this) venture actually transcends the imaginative into the real.<br>The social contract is laid out as The Deal herein, but first I need to explain how we got the resources to get us this far.<br>Lastly, I'll spell out our outstanding debts to our diaspora of stakeholders. This post will be followed by a co-announcement with our prospective stewarding foundation.<br>Seed Money<br>Coming off of a formative travel experience, I became an early employee at Discourse (number 7-8 I think) in late 2015. At that point I had already spent over two years contributing several hundred hours of free work to the Discourse project. I was using Discourse in my own open source community, so my internet-friends and I benefited directly from any improvement I could effect into the Discourse software.<br>About four years later I had become VP of Community at Discourse Inc., aka Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Incorporated. Deeply invested in the project as a whole, I had strong opinions on how it should be run. These opinions eventually diverged so far from those of the founders that our paths were no longer aligned; we amicably parted ways in 2019.<br>In the last half of 2021 I returned for 6 months to direct the introduction of chat to Discourse. It eventually became a flagship feature, but never the way I'd envisioned it (as the primary entrypoint to every new community instance), hence the inevitable divergence.<br>That same year Discourse had also taken on its first venture-capital investment, after several years of being profitable as a by-now ~40 person company. (Wouldn't it be cool if this was the norm for startups?!)<br>This resulted in a very generous offer from Discourse-corp to buy my 1% of early-employee company-shares for $720,000 USD, which I gleefully agreed to. It felt like winning the lottery; I'd always considered the possibility that the company might never be sold or go public, or that'd it somehow be turned worthless by the unpredictable irrationality of the market.<br>But to my great delight The Very Good Thing that could happen did happen. At the start of 2020 I found myself, after taxes, with about $570k to play with.<br>Five whole years later I've basically spent it all. The napkin expense sheet looks something like..
$150k to buy up the 2nd half of my 50m2 apartment (housing 3 cohabitants) in Oslo, which has kept my ongoing living expenses to a minimum.
$200k for five years of living costs for myself and a dependant.
$135k invested in 3-4 years of developing Spicy Lobster and Fish Folk, an indie game studio and open game (at 90% completion), the game engine of which has directly informed Roomy's architecture, i.e. the investments overlap and sometimes hard to separate cleanly.
$135k invested in 3-4 years of developing Roomy (including Weird and Commune before it, all under the stewardship of the Muni Town collective).
$50k invested in miscellanous open source projects, around half in zero-obligation GitHub sponsorships.
Helped on by an additional $140k in grants and angel-investments this last year (more details below), the Roomy team has kept a team of three ramen-budget full-timers through the first half of 2026. Those funds are now nearing exhaustion.<br>This may sound dire, but it just means the three people (erlend.sh, zicklag.dev & meri.garden) now working full-time on Roomy would have to balance ongoing work on Roomy with paying gigs to keep ourselves afloat while we continue driving our venture forward.<br>Pursuing investment<br>First up: Purpose Ventures. (done in May; they've referred us to a tech-specialist post-growth investor we'll be talking to next this July)<br>The Deal<br>The only honest way to "promise" equity to a group of collaborators is to clarify that the most likely outcome is failure.<br>What follows is a draft of The Deal for Roomy-corporation‘s Founders, Founding Partners, Co-workers and Investors.<br>Founders<br>Erlend and Kapono (zicklag) are entitled to 2x their $750k work-investment (capital equity) thus far;<br>calculated from 5 years of work in the period 2021-2025. 2-5 if counting only Muni/Roomy-specific...