Yancey Strickler

She's with Morrison Forster in San Francisco.

She was part of the Patagonia public trust structure early in PBCs, like innovator, big corporate innovator.

And Suze became my collaborator on this project.

And Suze and I began to...

just feeding in some of the ideas I'd had and things I talked about with friends over the years and research that we were doing, and began to create a model structure of how you could make a new version of an LLC, which is the most vanilla legal structure that exists,

but making a version that has pre-built in these things that are hard for artists and creative people to get today, that are more typical for a small business, and that could give them upside and shared benefits in a way that do not exist today.

And so we had a year of research, drafting, talking to people.

And then that work was shared publicly for the first time at TED last year in Vancouver.

I gave a talk introducing the idea for this.

And when I walked off the stage at TED, a bunch of people wanted to talk, and quite a few of them were from Colorado who said, hey, we have a great creative community.

We are trying to embrace the arts even more so.

We just brought Sundance to Colorado.

You should come meet some people here.

I think they would be receptive.

And so I said yes to the universe and made five trips there last year, just met with folks all over the state and all areas of life.

encountered such, not even enthusiasm, but I thought I was going to need to convince politicians that creative people mattered.

And because I was dealing with politicians that are closer to the ground, state and local level, what I found was that they understood it better than I did.

And that for them, for a mayor of a town on the western slope of Colorado, they know that people go to this town instead of that town because of

the arts, because of culture, because of heritage, and that a city, a place's ability to embrace those things, to tell stories with them, that's what makes people want to go places.

That's what makes places worth belonging to.