Putting Post Growth Theory Into Practice

Melanie Rieback is the founder of the Post Growth Entrepreneurship
(PGE) Incubator, Nonprofit Ventures, as well as her own successful post
growth business, Radically Open Security (ROS). We sat down with Melanie to find out more about the innovative program helping founders break free from traditional business models and implement sustainable non-extractive practices.

How do you define Post Growth Entrepreneurship?

I would say it’s entrepreneurship and startup incubation that is focused on building non-extractive and not-for-profit businesses. So we’re trying to use entity forms like foundations and Steward Ownership. We promote cross-subsidizing charity with our businesses, and we’re trying to offer an alternative for startup founders who want to bring their activist, artistic, spiritual business ideas to life without selling out in the commercial startup ecosystem. Too much of the startup ecosystem uses the Silicon Valley model of ‘capital, scale, exit.’ Instead we’re promoting: bootstrapping, flat growth, and non-extraction.

What brought you to post growth thinking and approaches?

When I started my cybersecurity business I knew I wanted it to be a social enterprise. I have philosophical differences with market leaders in the space: they work with intelligence agencies, they hack activists, they build surveillance black boxes that get sold to developing countries; so I wanted to find a way to separate out the profit motive from the actual operational vehicle of a business.

I stumbled on a model from the Dutch church, called a Fiscal
Fundraising Institution (FFI), where money is raised via a commercial
spin-off and then donated back into the church with tax benefits. So we decided to create an IT security company, and our so-called “church” is the NLnet Foundation, a charity that supports digital rights and open source initiatives…

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