Foundree develops owners.
Foundree is a venture residency in Long Beach, California. It turns real work into real ownership. For cities, counties, and foundations, it is infrastructure for economic mobility.
The gap between jobs and ownership
Economic development measures employment. Jobs created, wages paid, placements completed: these are the numbers a strategic plan reports, and they are worth reporting. Ownership is missing from the list. Almost no plan tracks who ends up owning the businesses a community depends on.
Ownership decides what a community keeps. When a company relocates, the jobs go with it. When a company is acquired, the profits flow to the acquirer. When an owner retires without a successor, the business simply ends. Local ownership holds wealth in place through all three, because the decision about where value flows belongs to someone who lives there.
That ownership is now changing hands at enormous scale. Six million American businesses will change hands by 2035, and roughly one million of them will actually sell (McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility, “The Great Ownership Transfer,” February 2026). Up to $5 trillion in cumulative value is in motion, with up to 12 million jobs and $250 billion in annual local spending power at stake (McKinsey, 2026). On the current trajectory, only about 28 percent of that transfer value is on track to reach women and Black and Latino owners combined (McKinsey, 2026). The owners are not ready for it: fewer than one in three business owners have a documented exit plan (Exit Planning Institute, 2023), even though nearly three-quarters of owners with employees intend to sell or transfer (Gallup, 2025).
About 28 percent of transfer value on track to reach women and Black and Latino owners combined (McKinsey, 2026)
owners have a documented exit plan (Exit Planning Institute, 2023); nearly three-quarters of owners with employees intend to sell or transfer (Gallup, 2025)
The tools that create local ownership are proven and rare at the same time. Nationally, 6,411 companies have an employee stock ownership plan, out of roughly 33 million US businesses (National Center for Employee Ownership), and 751 worker cooperatives are known to exist (Democracy at Work Institute). The small counts are not a verdict on the tools. Both structures work. Both are designed for companies that already exist, with revenue to value and payroll to convert. Neither can reach a business in its formative years, when ownership is actually decided.
Meanwhile, the field's largest expenditure buys the weaker strategy. State and local governments spend roughly $70 billion a year on business attraction incentives (Good Jobs First). Studies of those incentives find a near-zero net effect on job creation, at an average cost near $600,000 per job (Good Jobs First). Local ownership outperforms on the field's own terms: $100 spent at a local independent business generates $45 of local respending, versus $14 at a chain (Institute for Local Self-Reliance).
A community that wants to keep its wealth needs a way to create owners early, while a company's structure is still being decided. That is the gap Foundree exists to close.
The ladder and the elevator
A career has a ladder. Training, placement, promotion, raises: every rung is real, and every rung is earned. The public workforce system exists to help people climb it.
Ownership rides an elevator, and the elevator is in a different building. Cap tables, founder equity, carried interest: wealth that compounds travels this way, among people who were already inside.
Almost no one who starts on the ladder ever reaches the elevator. The two are not connected. A person can climb for an entire career, do everything right, and never hold a share of what the work built.
Foundree puts the ladder and the elevator in the same building.
Every hour is recorded on an auditable ledger as it is worked, and recorded work converts toward ownership only when the venture demonstrates revenue, customers, or funding, never on a date or a promise. A person can start on a payroll and rise to a cap table, with every step recorded and auditable.
Five doors
Ownership at Foundree takes five forms. Evidence decides which one, not where a person started. The five doors are outcomes, not entrances: nobody starts at a door, nobody is assigned one, and nobody is promised one.
A stake in an independent company.
The venture graduates independent, and the stake earned on its books leaves with the person who earned it.
A cooperative.
Governance is one member, one vote. The economic stakes earned during the building years sit beneath the shared vote.
A steward-owned firm.
Steward ownership removes the sale, so the mission outlasts every owner.
A business earned through succession.
A trained successor earns an existing local business in stages, against marks proven in that business's own books, while the retiring owner exits on a chosen timeline. Nothing is ever listed. The need is documented: nearly three-quarters of owners with employees plan to sell or transfer (Gallup, 2025), yet in 2022, 92 percent of small business exits ended in closure and only 5 percent were completed sales (McKinsey, 2026). Those two findings support a derived estimate, not a published figure: only about 1 in 10 owners who plan to sell will complete a sale.
2022 exits, per 100:92 closed5 sold3 transferred A company founded outright.
The founder holds the majority from day one, backed by Foretell Labs, Foundree's venture studio, and by a community. The venture clears the same evidence test as every other Foundree venture.
Each door opens the same way: recorded work, converted on evidence.
Already real
McKinsey calls the ownership shift underway “one of the most powerful pathways to wealth creation in the United States” (McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility, 2026). Employees at companies with an employee stock ownership plan earn a median wage 23 percent higher and hold 45 percent higher median household wealth than peers at companies without one (Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing, 2019 to 2025).
Two companies have already completed the structure Foundree runs. Both were developed inside the Venture Residency, cleared their milestones, and operate independently today with their own investors.
Localight
A public benefit corporation in local commerce.
Charging Cities
An EV charging infrastructure company: the kind of firm most city plans call for and few city programs produce.
Participants' earned conversions run through a fixed-value certificate with a real maturity date and a defined growth bonus, not speculative equity. The first certificates have already matured and paid.
For cities, counties, and foundations
Institutions already fund the ladder: training, placement, apprenticeship, wage progression. Almost none have a way to fund the elevator.
The limits of the current toolkit are structural, not a matter of effort. Workforce placements plateau, because a wage alone rarely becomes wealth. The ownership tools on the conference circuit are built for companies that already exist, with revenue to value and payroll to convert. Nothing in the standard toolkit covers the years when value is being created but there is not yet anything to own. Venture capital will not cover those years either. The San Francisco Bay Area alone took roughly 55 percent of US venture dollars in 2025, which excludes most regions from venture capital by geography, not talent (Crunchbase/Carta).
What exists in Long Beach can be examined directly.
- A shared legal container that holds many early ventures at once.
- A reportable wage for every participant from day one.
- Compatibility with the earn-and-learn and apprenticeship frameworks workforce boards already run.
- A ledger that is audit-ready by construction, so funder reporting comes off the same records that govern ownership.
- Graduation through whichever of the five doors the evidence supports.
- LIFT, the legal framework behind all of it: a Delaware statutory trust series structure, published as an open standard, with no license fee and no headquarters approval.
LIFT is an open standard. There is no license fee and no headquarters approval. A region that wants a residency like the one in Long Beach adapts the published documents to its own programs and partners, and the region builds its own. Foundree is in conversation with regions beyond Long Beach, specifically Washington, DC, and Tucson, Arizona.
The invitation is plain. A single cohort can pilot alongside existing workforce funding rules. For a briefing or a pilot conversation, write to partners@foundree.org.
For everyone else
Founders, athletes, business owners, community capital organizers, fund stewards, and press each have a dedicated page. One line for each, and a door.
- Make It Real
Founders.
Make It Real is a subscription service: an experienced crew works your venture in two-week sprints toward a milestone you set. No equity is taken. - A2X Forge
Athlete programs.
The jersey comes off. The discipline does not. A2X Forge is the six-week accelerator built the way athletes actually develop. - Succession
Business owners.
The buyer you are waiting for does not exist. The successor you could train does. - Community Capital
Community capital.
Sweat equity is the oldest promise in community enterprise and the most commonly broken. The fix is three commitments, held at the same time. - Fund Stewards
Fund stewards.
The way in is no longer through a fund. - press@foundree.org
Press.
For interviews and background, write to press@foundree.org.
The mechanics are free
Equity, vesting, milestones, cooperatives, succession: learnable, and almost nowhere teaches them. Foundree does. Plain language, no account, no email gate, no upsell. Take what is useful. Owe nothing.
Knowing how ownership works is its own kind of power.
A desk, not a destiny
Membership is $350 a month, month to month: a desk at 3rd Street, four sessions a month on how the pathways work, and the company of people building companies. It stays on this side of the line: access and learning, never an investment, never a queue. Some stay a season and move on. That is fine.