Pete Russell

Business was easy.

He thought he had a natural knack and that this was an exciting new thing and it lined up with everything and now we've got online commerce.

The iPhone had just come out.

this thing in two or three years, it's going to be bigger than the supermarkets.

It's going to be amazing.

And we just got to play our cards right.

And if you told him that, you know, in 15 years, you're going to be at the grindstone, you'll have made good progress, but not as far as you think.

And it's still going to be hard.

He just said, yeah.

but we're purpose-driven, meaning our purpose is to put small scale back at the heart of the food system, or in other words, to decentralize the food system.

But we need to be very commercially sound in order to do that properly.

And so we are a for-profit company, but steward ownership sort of changes the nature of a for-profit business model in two key ways.

What it does is it recognizes that shareholders have sort of two main entitlements to their shares.

They have the right to profits and they have the right to control.

What steward ownership does is it decouples those two rights and it puts them into two separate buckets.

And so it says, okay, the right to control needs to be given and held by the people who are driven by the purpose of why this company exists.

So they will have the ability to make the decisions as to the direction of the company and ensure that it's going in the direction that it was intended from the beginning.

And the right to rewards is held by the people who have invested into the company, who believe in the purpose, who are aligned with the purpose.

But they don't get to control it.

They don't get to say, oh, there's an opportunity.