“In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf”—thus begins The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Venture capital attorney James Wigginton and entrepreneur Jordan Volz likened the maturation of the book’s caterpillar to growth phases of a start-up business. Championing the theory that maximizing efficiency and minimizing waste requires legal ownership by the group that bears the greatest cost and risk, they explored the evolution of these factors in the business life cycle. While investors necessarily bear the cost and risk during startup and growth phases, as a business matures and gains market dominance the paradigm shifts and customers bear these burdens. This is particularly true where a business has become a monopoly.
But how can customers take ownership of a business? While customer-owned cooperatives do exist (for example, mutual companies owned by policyholders), there are few mechanisms in place to facilitate an ownership transfer to customers in order to transform an investor-owned caterpillar into customer-owned butterfly. Wigginton and Volz advocated for new federal legislation to accomplish this goal and urged BYU Law students to think about cooperatives as paving the way for a fairer future that is closer to the Zion ideal of the city of Enoch where people “dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them” (Moses 7:18).
