At Kill the Cloud (KtC), our mission is to dismantle the infrastructure of techno-feudalism and bring about an era free from tech behemoths selling our data, littering the world with data centers, harming their users, and undermining democracy. Instead, each of us must own and control the digital infrastructure of our lives. We believe we can achieve this by offering preconfigured home servers allowing non-technical individuals to exit the cloud and reclaim their individual digital sovereignty.

It’s a ridiculously audacious goal, and to achieve it, KtC requires an organizational architecture fundamentally different from any company in history.

For the last hundred years, we, as a society, have been building companies all wrong. Every for profit company consists of essentially two groups: shareholders and employees. The best employees want to create something they are proud of, they want to offer a product or service that improves people’s lives. Shareholders, on the other hand, ultimately have an opposing goal: provide as little as possible, while extracting as much value as possible from both employees and customers. Shareholders gleefully exploit and corrupt the virtuous motivations of their employees in order to maximize shareholder value.

Of course, one of these groups holds all the power and reaps all of the rewards, while the other has all of the competence, knowledge, and understanding. Eventually, this asymmetrical configuration will enshittify everything it touches: the product, services, company culture, the environment, the mental health of employees & customers alike, and even damage adjacent organizations such as governments.

The remedy is simple: make every employee a shareholder with equal voting rights. This type of company already exists, and they are known as workers collectives. The largest in the world is Mondragon, with over 80,000 employees.

It’s a great start, but not enough for KtC. We’re taking the idea of workers collectives and extending it into something we call a Democratic Company. In a Democratic Company, the company constitution dictates:

For a deeper explanation, read this detailed definition. For an explanation of the rationale behind these rules read Software Never Needed to Eat the World.

We have outlined the legally enforceable bylaws by which KtC operates as a democratic company with financial limitations on profits, salaries, payouts, and holdings to ensure we make great products, not terrible Bond villains. It’s our organizational DNA, but what about our cultural DNA? What about our mission and the day to day of getting it done?

The Principles of Killing the Cloud

Anti-SaaS

Software as a Service may begin with good intentions, but given time it inevitably leads to lower quality and exorbitant fees. It turns out, rather unsurprisingly, that owning nothing and renting everything is a precarious position for customers.

Deliver tangible value to genuinely consenting people

Our products must clearly deliver real value to our customers, without corrupting their wants and desires for our own gain.

For example, someone might create an Instagram account to share their photography with their friends, but this intention is easily corrupted to enrich Instagram. Instead of showing their photography to all of their friends, Instagram provides an algorithmically curated feed. By providing a “Like” button and notifications, Instagram begins conditioning this person to desire a larger audience, more likes, and more followers.

Selling a product to individual customers, rather than selling users to advertisers, means we must satisfy and delight actual people rather than corporate entities and their shareholders.

Create finished & polished products

Selling a prototype as a product is not a recipe for quality. We create products we love to use ourselves. Creating a new product and sharing it with the world should be a labour of love, a creative, opinionated, and intrinsically rewarding process. Money must always be a side effect, not the primary outcome.

Customer feedback is a valuable source of inspiration that can enhance creativity and product vision, but it cannot and must not replace our passion and love of our creations. Data is a tool, but we are not a “data-driven“ company — we go to work every day to make great products, not to make numbers go up.

Once a product has shipped, we must avoid unnecessary updates. Too often, as time goes on product updates increasingly serve the business rather than the customer. For example, ads being integrated into Windows, or Copilot being integrated into Notepad. Bits don’t rot — eventually, a product can and should be finished.

Sell once, at a reasonable price

Our customers must own what they’ve purchased. We are not in the rental business, and we are not interested in creating a techno-fiefdom.

Anti-Cloud

Our customers own their data, stored on hardware they own that runs software they own. We are recreating the internet as it should have been.

No Investors

KtC exists only to delight customers. Venture Capital firms are an exceedingly ineffective system for allocating society‘s excess capital. Companies become addicted to and corrupted by venture capital funding. We must always run a good business with sound unit economics and positive cash flow.

No Billionaires

KtC is strictly a “lifestyle business” — we firmly believe there is such a thing as too much money. We’re interested only in creating a business we enjoy working at, where we strive to achieve difficult things because they are worth doing rather than for a financial reward. Virtue is a better north star than value.

Replication Rather Than Infinite Growth

We’re not aiming to become the world’s largest Home Server provider, we don’t need to be a category king. If KtC can reach financial saturation through the market here in Australia, then we don’t need to grow the business internationally. Instead, we can share the playbook to replicate our business, and potentially invest in, with no strings attached, Democratic Companies that continue our mission overseas.

This leads to a healthier, more distributive economy made up of many smaller businesses rather than consolidating resources in a single large company and creating a single point of failure.

It also maintains a better working culture where we each have more direct impact and democratic power. Ultimately, smaller companies are better for our mental health.

How We Work

So far we have talked about our mission and by-laws, which should be pretty much immutable and difficult to change, and then our principles, which may be refined over time but should largely remain unchanged. Now we need to think about how we should work and organize ourselves day to day, which we could continuously experiment with and change as we see fit.

Slow Productivity

Moving fast and breaking things has a well established track record of leading to harmful and corrupt products & companies. What we are trying to achieve requires thoughtful consideration, insightful creativity, and an inspired vision of what could be. We need to do the opposite of hustle burnout culture, that is:

That means no KPIs and definitely no deadlines. Ideas get the time they need. Take the time to think; sometimes that looks like doing nothing but staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours. This does mean we all need the financial literacy required to deeply understand the business — don’t worry, anyone can learn it!

Four-day Workweek

Because life isn’t work. KtC will be fine, and we will likely be more energized and inspired anyway.

Strictly No AI

Using AI robs us of our skills, our crafts, of opportunities to learn, our reality, our uniqueness, and of our humanity.

I would never expect anyone to take the time to read something I hadn’t taken the time to write, whether that is a document or a piece of code. The work itself is the point, the friction is valuable, and overcoming it is virtuous.

Further reading: