Articles

▶ The Problem: Traditional Crowdfunding Is Broken Kickstarter gives you product without ownership. StartEngine gives you ownership without product. What if you could have both? Kickstarter’s Fatal Flaw You back a project: $50, $100, maybe $500 You get: A product (if it ships) You don’t get: Any ownership in what you helped create The creator: Keeps 100% of the equity Result: You funded someone else’s dream, but you don’t share in the success StartEngine’s Missing Piece You invest: $100, $500, maybe more You get: Equity shares You don’t get: The actual product you want Result: You own part of something you can’t use The Choice Nobody Should Have To Make Traditional crowdfunding forces you to choose: ...

▶ The Problem with Platform Economics Traditional e-commerce platforms create adversarial relationships. Sellers maximize margins, platforms extract fees, buyers distrust prices. What if we inverted that? Traditional e-commerce platforms create adversarial relationships. Sellers maximize margins while hiding costs. Platforms extract fees from both sides. Buyers hunt for deals while distrusting prices. Everyone is playing against everyone else. The result: a race to the bottom where trust is a liability and opacity is a competitive advantage. ...

How One Founder’s IP Funds a Cooperative Platform ▶ The Problem I have an airplane—a really good one. Forty years of design. 1,200+ documented innovations. But I have no aircraft carrier... I have an airplane. A really good one. Forty years of design. Nine years of active construction. 1,200+ documented innovations, prototypes over 23 years. The patent portfolio includes 99% utility patents — not design — protected by 210 formal claims across 7 applications. Eight definite with 9 more out of the first 130 so far have survived a deep dive against the U.S. patent office with no prior art found. ...

The Liana Banyan platform operates on a distinct economic logic — one that inverts traditional e-commerce assumptions. Where conventional platforms optimize for opacity and extraction, this system optimizes for transparency and mutual benefit. These eleven laws describe the fundamental mechanics that make cooperation economically rational and defection economically irrational. They are not aspirational values — they are enforced constraints built into the platform’s architecture. ▶ The Eleven Laws From the C+20 Law (sellers retain 83.3%) to the C+20 Reciprocity Law, these eleven laws form the economic operating system for cooperative commerce... 1. The C+20 Law (Transparent Margin Constraint) Sellers retain exactly 83.3% of transaction value. ...

Most digital marketplaces optimize for volume and margin, not for trust or shared prosperity. Creators and small businesses are pushed into opaque pricing, asymmetric fees, and extractive platform terms. In response, Liana Banyan adopts a simple but demanding rule: Cost + 20% forever. Creators cover their real costs and keep a fair 20% margin; the platform’s economics sit on top of that, not inside it. This paper proposes a concrete implementation of that rule through C+20 certification and partial badges, embedded inside a broader engagement architecture: Ghost/Real mode, WildFire onboarding tours, Golden Key deposits, guilds, reciprocal networks, and an IP Load Balancing system that prevents wealth concentration. Together, these systems turn pricing transparency into a membership signal—a visible way of saying “one of us”. ...

An Open Letter to Tatiana Schlossberg Dear Ms. Schlossberg, I read with great sorrow your New Yorker piece about your diagnosis and the maybe year you have left. About the medications that might buy you more time, if you can afford them, if your insurance approves them, if the system deems you worthy of another sunrise. I’m a stranger, but I’m writing anyway. Not because I can fix what’s broken in your body. But because you’ve spent your career documenting what’s broken in our systems, and I think you’d like to know it can be changed. I have the math, and the application, live and working, to prove it. ...

Strategic Defense: Answering Objections Before They’re Raised “The best defense is a good offense. Or in this case, a thoroughly researched response written before anyone attacks.” ▶ Why This Document Exists We spent nine years building Liana Banyan. We've thought through every objection. Rather than wait for critiques to arrive, we're publishing our responses now—complete with embedded treasure hunt keys... We spent nine years building Liana Banyan. We’ve thought through every objection. Rather than wait for critiques to arrive and respond reactively, we’re publishing our responses now—complete with embedded treasure hunt keys for readers who engage deeply with our counter-arguments. ...

Liana Banyan treats its patent portfolio like an aircraft carrier: shared infrastructure that lets thousands of businesses take off, not a private moat for one owner. The economics are designed so the cooperative and its workers stay in control, external sponsors are rewarded well for real risk, and nobody can extract rent forever. ▶ Who Owns What For the patent portfolio we've already built (1,200+ documented innovations over 23 years): 60% Platform, 20% Founder, 20% External Pool... For the patent portfolio we’ve already built (1,200+ documented innovations over 23 years): ...

How Liana Banyan’s Economic Model Differs from Traditional Venture Capital People ask: “Why aren’t you raising venture capital?” The short answer: Because VC funding is designed to extract maximum value, and we’re designed to sustain it. The longer answer requires understanding two fundamentally different economic philosophies—and why they can’t coexist in the same organization. ▶ The Core Comparison A side-by-side comparison of Traditional VC vs Liana Banyan's IP Load Balancing across ownership, returns, control, and goals... Dimension Traditional VC Liana Banyan / IP Load Balancing Ownership concentration Few funds own large equity blocks Platform 60%, creator ~20%, external capital 20% max, spread across many small stakes Return profile Power-law, unbounded; a few 100× outcomes drive fund Per-stake returns capped ($10M) then recycled; no permanent rent streams Control rights Investors often take board seats, vetoes, liquidation preferences Platform retains majority; creators choose control tier; external capital has economic rights, not governance control Early vs late entrants Early investors capture most upside; latecomers pay high valuations Caps and splitting reopen slots at fair value; new participants get “first-round”-like opportunities even late Geography / currency Strong-currency investors advantaged; weak-currency founders often excluded Three-gear currency equalizes internal purchasing power via Credits/Marks/Joules Goal Maximize financial return to LPs, often via exits or IPO Sustain platform, workers, and communities; “enough” is encoded in margins and caps ▶ What VC Funding Assumes Traditional venture capital operates on a power-law assumption: most investments fail, a few return 100×, and every deal must have unlimited upside potential... Traditional venture capital operates on a power-law assumption: ...

Jonathan R. Jones Founder & General Manager, Liana Banyan Corporation In November 2017, a user on Hacker News wrote: “Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. Rich kids can afford many throws. They try over and over until they hit something, then give speeches about meritocracy. Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.” ...