Christian Kroll

“Ecosia is withdrawing from capitalism” was the headline of the Business Punk magazine this October. The founder of Ecosia.org, the search engine that uses the profits to plant trees (now more than 40 million planted!), Christian Kroll did something that hardly anyone in tech has ever done: instead of selling his businesses, which would have been worth millions of Euros with 8 million users per month, or going public, Christian gave the company to “itself.” With the help of the Purpose Foundation, Ecosia is now steward-owned. All its profits are either reinvested or donated to planting trees. Similarly radical, Jolocom, a successful blockchain startup, transitioned to steward-ownership. Both companies chose interesting paths for setting up a startup that clearly communicates to its employees and community that the company doesn’t serve to make founders or investors wealthy and will never land in the hands of Facebook or Google. This creates a different kind of trust and impacts how it is to work at these companies. Christian and Kai explain their paths to steward-ownership and how its impacted their companies.