Ask HN: Is there a structure for startups where you can have 50 founders?

There is an enormous opportunity where lot of people could give small amount of time, network or money to make lots of ideas come to life. But right now it doesn't happen because of concerns:

- distrust, how would I know I'm awarded fairly? who decides that? lets say I worked on something I was good at, i.e. I made a logo or I designed database schema. how much should I get?

- accountability, this company gave 50 people its shares, where are they now? are they just vesting? why should I bother with that baggage? is there mechanism to dilute inactive participants? how much? who decides that?

- fair accounting

it's a legal challenge but also more of a logistic challenge.

Imagine if there was crowd/democratic way to build companies:

- people can join and leave

- people shouldn't be able to game or take over the equity grants

- people should be awarded appropriately

- system should be able independently track cost and revenue

I wish it could be done in a non-centralized way but I think there is no avoiding it, unless some legal framework is created by the govt, an entity/org that will work for very broke startups too.

I dont know the right answer but here is what I propose:

Create a non-profit org who maintains and runs the system. Least involvement the better.

- anyone can start a project/company at this org.

- first person(s) create list of roles, they interview all of them and vet.

- once they have vetted and gotten 12 people interested, the org issues in-game currency of 1 million

- this 1 million gets divided to all 12 people equally

- lets say someone is working FT on project and requests higher %, they can propose dilution of others and 70% equity holders must agree.

- there is a task nobody knows how to do they create a public request, and people get paid in game currency and gain equity.

- if one day company starts generating money, the non-profit takes the revenue, distribute it according to equity.

- if company incurs loses then non-profit waits for the company to cover it

- company decides to sell shares/currency, remember it's 1:1, so they say we are selling $10k worth of equity/currency. And that gets deposited to company's bank.

ISSUES:

- how to address problem of formerly active members/shareholders...

  -- Maybe if someone was involved before company had revenue they get privileges that people who contributed after revenue don't.

  -- You can't track this with GIT commits or something, what about someone sharing the site to their 5M twitter followers, that's immense value.

  -- What about senior founders abusing system as a gang?

This can't work unless the system takes care of things automatically, acting as a third person is just asking for trouble.

I think open source and MLM are inspiration for this model. MLM gets an army of people to work for common goal, although it's a scam.