The World’s First Publicly Traded Person with Mike Merrill and Marcus Estes

On this episode of Venture Stories, Erik is joined by Mike Merrill (@kmikeym), the world’s first and only publicly traded person, along with Mike’s friend, co-founder and shareholder, Marcus Estes (@marcusestes), co-founder and CEO of Chroma.

We hear the backstory on how Mike became the world’s first “publicly traded person” and hear a funny story about an early 2000s arts group turned their group into a corporation in order to thwart an attempt by an e-commerce company to take over their domain name.

They run through the ins and outs of what life is like for Mike and how having a live market where anyone can buy or sell “shares” in him distinguishes this from other experiments. He says that he originally set up the arrangement to give people input into his side projects but over time their decision-making power has expanded to his personal life. He explains how this has influenced how he thinks about the idea of owning “shares” in other people more generally.

Mike talks about the element of satire present in the project and how it has poked fun at the idea in society that worth in general is tied to financial factors. He talks about how this project has revealed warped incentives for his investors.

They describe the regulatory environment in America, how it has evolved to make things like this possible, and the unique way that Mike has structured this to make it legal. They talk about whether it would make sense for more people to do this, about income-share agreements more broadly and how Marcus and Chroma might get involved.

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Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.