For the people in rooms where hard things get built.
Flying the Coop is Janel and Anna of Strange Birds, a worker-owned co-op, thinking out loud about how structure shapes what's possible.
Conversations with founders, operators, and organizational leaders doing serious work on what business can actually be.
#19 We did the thing and you can too: We're a co-op!
"We're optimizing for a sustainable container to take care of the people within it — and to do some cool work while we're at it." - Janel Torkington
Most businesses optimize for growth. Scale as much as possible, make as much money as possible, get as big as possible. It seems like the only option in the playbook.
But that path has never called to us.
Strange Birds has been operating as a cooperative for three years, and six months ago we made it official. This episode, we take a beat to stop and ask, wait, why did we do that? What are we optimizing for instead? Is it working? Also, what are you wearing?
We get into:
Why our style of consensus-based decision-making tops out around five people
Why and how we've set up equal pay for equal hours (bonus: patronage refunds vs. dividends! A tiny schmear of tax code!)
The un-touchy un-feely case for designing an anti-burnout business
Why we often advise our clients to downgrade their subscription tier with us
Janel: still detoxing from US productivity culture
Anna: anti-cutting up watermelon
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Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker owned cooperative. Strange Birds helps purpose driven companies say out loud what makes them worth choosing. We build stronger connections between audiences and brands with the right messaging. Then we implement it across the board.
Find us at http://strangebirds.land
4 Jun 2026
#18 EMMA Technology Cooperative: Businesses need more verbs
"When you take infinite growth off the table, this entire world of possibilities opens up." — Ramsey Nassar, EMMA Technology Cooperative
We make this show to learn things, ask good questions, and let really cool people shine (and maybe occasionally get a little clever ourselves). This conversation did something different: it reminded us that what we're building isn't just a business model. It can be radical. And maybe it should be.
Ramsey Nassar, Gwen Pasquarello, and Andy Wallace at EMMA Technology Cooperative have spent five years as a worker-owned co-op building software and hardware for video games, theater, public installation, and media arts. And theme parks. And custom programming languages. And a nonprofit arcade collective. They're thriving.
This one gets into:
Why consensus produces the highest quality decisions at the lowest velocity
How their compensation model works: flat salary plus a percentage of every invoice cleared, paid out throughout the year as patronage dividends
How they survived a 10-month dry spell: suspending commissions, recording a debt to members on the books, and plugging away regardless
The Venn diagram problem: useful and interesting work vs. profitable work
Also: Emma Goldman (now on our reading list), and the strong case for EMMA jumpsuits
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Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a strategic marketing cooperative. We help small yet mighty teams figure out what actually needs to happen — and then we go do it with them. Most partners bring only thinking or doing. We bring both to your big idea, and we stay until it's shipped.
Find us at http://strangebirds.land
7 May 2026
#17 Jessica Lackey: You can't move faster than the speed of your own growth
"If they teach you how to build a business, you stop buying their stuff. That's not what they want." — Jessica Lackey
A lot of business advice is a slot machine dressed up as a strategy.
Jessica Lackey's book Leaving the Casino lays it out cold: the entrepreneurial industrial complex isn't, in fact, designed to help you build a sustainable business. It's designed to keep you spending money on the PROMISE of one.
She and Anna get into:
Why and how the casino targets the most vulnerable entrepreneurs, MLM-style
The zone of enoughness: how to define your minimum and maximum across money, time, schedule flexibility, and creative autonomy
Why "just raise your prices" might be the most misplaced advice in the industry, and what to actually do instead
The difference between slowing down your activity and slowing down your expectations
Why if your marketing isn't working, it's probably your market, not your mindset
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Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker-owned co-op.
When the opportunity is clear and the doing feels impossible, we get inside your hardest project, find what needs to happen, and follow it all the way through.
Find us at http://strangebirds.land
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