We’re very excited to share that we’re expanding our team with a new person and new expertise: Zhuo-Fei Hui, a senior back-end developer, is joining us as a full member (more on what that means below). You can follow her on Twitter!
003: Welcome Zhuo-Fei Hui, our fourth member!
A bit of backstory: Back in the early days of V01 we talked to a few people from our network about potentially joining the team and with Fei we just felt a different level of energy: She had so many good observations, ideas and feedback, immediately understood what we’re trying to do with V01 and also had just left her job at Blinkist. We were a match!
Since then she’s been working on her own projects, but also contributed to getting V01 through the founding process, adding her technical expertise to our projects, as well as bringing her calm, positive and humorous way of seeing things to our internal discussions. Her skills as a back-end dev complement ours in strategy/research, design and front-end development, to build digital products and infrastructure from first ideas all the way to release.
How did joining the co-op work? Two steps: First she signed an employment contract like you would in any other company, clarifying stuff like salary, working time or vacation. Then, secondly, she bought a share in the co-op for 100€ (yup, that’s not a typo). There’s a bit of paperwork around that, but it’s relatively quick and easy, no lawyers or notarization involved. Now she is an equal owner of the company—her voice carries the same weight as everyone else’s, she gets the same decision-making rights, the same financial access and also the same share of profits at the end of business years. Formally we’re now four entirely equal owners of Village One. We’ll describe all the details and also our interview process in another post soon!
When re-reading the last paragraph I have to admit that this is still somewhat mind-blowing for me: I co-founded a traditionally hierarchical company before and comparatively the co-op makes it so easy to add new owners and to share power in the organization. Its structure really mirrors our values around democratization, equity and transparency.
Anyhow! Welcome Fei! You’re the first of hopefully many people to move to the Village over time and I can’t wait to see what we’ll be doing together! This is also your company now—truly, not just as a figure of speech!
Onwards and upwards!
Harry