Door-Opener

Dear Representative Ocasio-Cortez, You have spent your career saying the economy should work for the people who actually work in it. I spent nine years building one that does. Liana Banyan is a cooperative commerce platform — three commercial websites with a constitutionally locked Cost+20% margin that sustainably funds sixteen charitable initiatives across food security, healthcare access, education, financial inclusion, civic engagement, and crisis response. Creators keep 83.3% of every transaction. Workers own the platform. Membership costs five dollars a year. No venture capital. No shareholders extracting value. No exit strategy — because the point is not to sell it, it is to sustain it. ...

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger, You told a crowd of graduates that there is no such thing as a self-made man. You listed every person who helped you — coaches, training partners, teachers, the country that took you in — and you said the words out loud that most successful people are afraid to say: “I didn’t do this alone.” Neither did anyone. And I built a platform around that fact. Liana Banyan is a cooperative commerce platform — three commercial websites with a constitutionally locked Cost+20% margin that sustainably funds sixteen charitable initiatives. Creators keep 83.3% of every transaction. Workers own the platform. Five dollars a year to join. No venture capital. No shareholders. No exit strategy. The operating agreement locks the economics so no future board can extract what belongs to the members. ...