About Revenue Share
OSE History
OSE is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization that relies on programmatic revenue for funding. As the core of our funding policy, we promote programmatic revenue from education programs and machine sales. We do this intentionally - so that we do not rely on foundation grants - which can disappear as fast as they appear - forcing orgnaizations to cut programs. OSE wants to put itself in a financially autonomous position, for reasons of continuity. As such, it operates more like a business - via its eearned, program revenue - as opposed to outside foundation funding. We are not opposed to foundation funding - that is just not where we put our energy. Instead, we spend our time on developing products - se that we create a viable funding model that would allow many organizations such as ourselves to bootstrap fund their operations.
We have achieved certain innovation on bootsrap funding. Early on (2007), we started crowdfunding and our True Fans program - 6 years before Patreon was founded. We ran kickstarter campaigns, posted funding baskets for individual projects, and eventually reached the world stage with the TED Talk. Within 3 years, we received about $1M in foundation funding, and things were great until that money went as fast as it came. This is what reinforced our notion of programmatic revenue being a stable way to fund projects - as no foundation will fund the revolution. They can help - but not to get OSE to the next trillion dollar economy with thousands of OSE campuses around the world. Our ambitions for regenerative solutions at scale are high - and a scalable enterprise model needs to be innovated to match that need.
To date - we have reversed the funding model in production, by innovating on the Extreme Manufacturing revenue model. In this model, the customer pays for an immersion learning experience - and there is also the possibility of a product sale - such as our Compressed Earth Block Press, a Power Cube, Tractor, 3D printer, or even a house. In our model - we don't only produce an immersion education experience - we produce a real product as we have developed ways that make this possible even with unskilled participant. We have lowered the barriers to entry to the point that even inexperienced participants can participate meaningfully in an immersion education/production experience that yields a real, functional product. Such a product can be sold in the marketplace, and in our model - we invite the customer to the actual build. This allows the customer to understand the machine to the point that they could even rebuild or fix the artifact - if they want to do it themselves. We produce transparent designs that are easy to fix and maintain for a lifetime.
As we teach people how to build machines or other products, there is the possibility of machine sales. Historically, some participants have asked about profit sharing, and misconceptions arise as people are not familiar with OSE's operations and funding. There are several aspects to this explanation. A savvy entrepreneur understands that a sustainable business must bring in more money than it spends. However - this point is very confusing to those unfamiliar with business - and it's even not clear to established entepreneurs. For example, as of this writing, this point is not clear even to a company like Uber, which as of today (May 2021) has yet to bring in more money than it spends. This page aims to clarify the issue of OSE's nonprofit operation, and the related concept of 'profit sharing'.
The first thing to point out is that an enterprise has operating costs. Whenever OSE makes a product sale - it operates like a business that sells products, not a non-profit that gets donor funding. With the business nature of any deal - there are operating costs, risks, years of product development behind the product, marketing costs, operating costs, staff, and facility operations. Whenever we produce something within an immersion workshop or education experience, there are significant costs involved. First, to develop and deliver an Extreme Manufacturing requires a lot of effort.