sqlorm is a new orm developed as part of hyperflask.
I use sqlalchemy daily, it's an amazing library, but I wanted something more lightweight and straightforward for this project. I find the unit of work pattern cumbersome
Thank you so much ! Great work with htmx, I'm a fan. This project is the culmination of a lot of concepts I like from many different stacks coming together.
I knew of unpoly but didn't know about alpine-ajax. My choice was set on htmx since the beginning. I feel it's a more mature solution with more flexibility.
From what I understand, there is no limitation regarding the type of company when it comes to the French Tech Visa (as long as it qualifies on the other requirements which focus more on the innovation aspect). (my coop would be eligible for example)
Starting a coop is like starting any other kind of company so same rules apply. (You must be at least 2 people of course!)
The problem really comes from the capacity for a coop to raise funds. A coop is a non-capitalistic company so very few investors are interested.
There is no valuation other than amount of shares x value of share. Voting power is not dependent on share (1 person = 1 vote).
Making an exit is thus not a possibility. Investors have little interest to finance a traditional company that would only yield dividends (if it does, which is not mandatory).
The problem of speed is also often cited: democracy takes more time. While I think that's true, I haven't felt that was a limiting factor. Financing is a much bigger one.
Not necessarily (the coop I work for is one though). There are 3 possible types of coops in France: SCOP, SCIC and CAE. To make it short:
- SCOP: adheres to the international definition of coops
- CAE: a coop of freelancers. You are an employee of the structure (with a work contract) but you have to bring in your own revenue to pay your salary. A percentage of your revenue goes towards the coop budget for shared services (accounting, hr, ...) and cash reserve
- SCIC: a multi-party coop. A good use case would be platforms where you could have multiple groups of stakeholders: employees of the platform, users and service providers. (eg. with a Uber like coop: employees, users and drivers could all be separate groups of owners). Each group has a voting percentage. No group can have more than 50% ownership.
I see great potential for the 2 other types of coops that France has in the context of tech. I do not know of any equivalent elsewhere (but would be happy to learn it exists!)
Happy to see this list here on which our coop startup appears! (https://kantree.io) It is very challenging to raise funds as a coop indeed but we have managed to do it on small amounts (a few hundreds of thousands). We are one of the few product based coop and not service based.
France (where we are based) is actually a very interesting market for coops. There is a very good legal framework around coops and a growing percentage of them. There's even an investment fund of tech coop as of recently! https://coopventure.fr/
I think coops are a great ownership model for the future and for a more responsible economy. It is too bad that there is still very little support and recognition around it.
I'm one of the co-founder of Digicoop, a worker cooperative based in France. We develop Kantree, a work management platform as SaaS or on-prem solution.
We are a small team, all employees are associates and we are remote first. New employees must become associate after 1 year.
The hardest part for us is funding as no investors are interested in worker coops.
We had quite a few hurdles on the way and the startup scene mostly rejects outliers like us as we have no true funding story to tell. But we really believe in this model and fight hard to keep going.
We have written about our company on kantree's blog if you want more details.
Indeed, their Android app is amazing and we hope to offer something of the same level in the future. Right now, Kantree is responsive and will adapt to smaller screens. The experience should be good on tablets. Unfortunately, we're still having a few touch and performance issues on larger projects which we are working on.
author of https://hyperflask.dev