What do you do if your pet enterprise fails? If you're a brave (or perhaps foolhardy) entrepreneur, you build something even more ambitious. Such is the case with Nick Oba. When his contributor-driven online magazine failed back in 2010, he came up with a bigger idea: take on Facebook, but make the members into shareholders. And thus Zurker was born.
As far as I know, no one has ever set up an online social network as effectively a co-op before, and as you'd expect, Zurker's set-up isn't quite that simple. As Zurker's About page explains, “Every Zurker user becomes a co-owner (future shareholder) of Zurker.” As Zurker hasn't had an IPO or anything of that nature yet, users earn vShares.
A vShare is a stake in Zurker; it's the unit of equity the company is allotting to members during the alpha and beta testing phases. They aren't actually stock. “vShares can be thought of as agreements between the owners of a startup about the size of their stake in the enterprise to be incorporated,” Zurker explains on its vShares page. One vShare equals one-millionth of a piece of the company. Users can earn vShares by signing up, and by inviting friends; they can also purchase them. “When 1,000,000 vShares have been allocated, Zurker will be restructured as a public corporation and vShares will become real shares,” Zurker elaborates.
That's not the only surprising step that Zurker has taken. In part because it's a co-op, Zurker has an open books policy. What does this mean? It means they have a page on which you can check their finances, line by line, for each country they're in.
That's another interesting difference: Zurker is an independent project in each country it's in, owned by the members of that country only, with its own balance sheet. Oba did this because “different markets react in different ways.” He's trying to avoid what he describes as “Friendster syndrome.” Friendster eventually became highly popular in the Philippines; in fact, the site quickly became dominated by members from that area of the world. The social network's US-based management, which was unfamiliar with that area, didn't know how to capitalize on the popularity and traffic. So the site ended up stagnating. Local owners will presumably not experience that problem.
So far, there are Zurker projects in the United States, United Kingdom, India, the Philippines, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia; there's also a Zurker Worldwide, for all other jurisdictions. As near as I can tell, this only matters for which vShares you're allowed to hold; someone from the US can't hold vShares for Zurker UK, for example. However, you can connect and interact normally with members on other versions of Zurker. “A member of Zurker UK can subscribe to a member of Zurker India,” the site helpfully explains. This, of course, brings us to the interface.
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