A Company Without Bosses | How a Worker-Owned Tech Company Makes Decisions Without Hierarchy

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

Overview

⏱️Schedule:  Doors 18:30 → Talk 19:00→ Q&A → Mingle
🌐Language: English

Most companies default to hierarchy because it’s easy: there’s a boss, a chain of command, and someone at the top who “decides”. Worker cooperatives choose a harder route: shared ownership, collective decision-making, and no single person who can bang the table and end the discussion.

But what does that actually look like on Monday morning?

In this talk, engineer Rakhi Sharma takes us inside a real worker-owned tech company to explore what changes when you’re not just an employee, but an owner. Using the example of a long-running open-source engineering cooperative, she’ll show how decisions get made without bosses, how conflict works when there’s no manager to escalate to, and what happens when a “flat” co-op grows beyond 150 people.

Rather than treating co-ops as utopian exceptions, this session looks at them as organizational patterns: repeatable systems that can survive market pressure, scale across countries, and stay aligned with their original values — all while being owned and run by the people doing the work.

Expect a practical look at governance, power, conflict, and incentives in companies where “democracy at work” is not a slogan but a daily reality.

Together, we’ll explore

• From employee to owner - What actually changes — in mindset, responsibility and behaviour — when you own the company you work for.

• What if everyone has an equal say? - How decisions get made without a traditional boss, and what happens when people strongly disagree.

• Conflict without managers  - How co-ops handle tension, disagreement and “deadlock” when there’s no hierarchical ladder to run up.

• Money, salaries and transparency - Who decides who earns what, how profits are distributed, and what pay transparency looks like in practice.

• Egalitarianism, day to day - The messy, human reality of “flat” structures: what works, what’s hard, and why some co-ops stay resilient for decades while many conventional startups burn out.

Speaker

Rakhi Sharma

Rakhi Sharma is an engineer and pre-partner working on browser engines and open-source technologies at a worker-owned tech cooperative. Beyond her technical work, she's experienced firsthand that a different way of working can scale - with shared ownership, transparency, and real agency for the people doing the actual work.