The tech agency with no boss and no shareholders

When you picture a tech agency, you probably imagine a founder or a couple of investors at the top, a hierarchy beneath them, and the profits flowing up to whoever owns the shares. Outlandish is none of that — a worker co-operative in Finsbury Park, London, with no boss and no external shareholders, run by consent, that puts its profits back into social change, including a community workspace it runs called Space4.

I spoke with two of its member-owners, Natasha Natarajan and Maddy Neghabian — and they're refreshingly unwilling to sell you the model. They're honest about how hard it is right now: a shrinking market, the arrival of AI, and the strange new problem that, as they put it, "it's almost become mainstream to be good." When B Corps and social enterprises are everywhere, how do you explain why genuine democratic ownership offers something different?

We get into why co-ops are still so hard to fund, what a business world built around the lone entrepreneur can't see, and why — for all the difficulty — neither of them wants to go back. It's a candid look at what it actually takes to do business differently, from two people doing it.

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