When companies go public, they are forced to prioritize profits over everything else. If any economy including digital economies has a need to extract profits away from economy participants (users and companies) economists call these "extractive economies". In 2024, the Nobel Prize for economics went to the economist authors of Why Nation's Fail in which they explained how extractive economies are historically a primary reason that countries fail. The MIT professors of economics go on to explain that when a growing % of capital in an economy is being extracted out of the economy for the benefit of a small percentage (1%) of the economy's participants, the others (99%) grow increasingly poor, eventually leading to the collapse of society including and especially democratic countries where power-hungry populist politicians tend to exploit the increasingly hopeless population to gain power. Usually both policy-less and corrupt, these type of politicians have historically tended to attack the free press and other pillars of democratic societies that have been erected to hold power accountable, accelerating the demise of that nation.Today's digital economies have quickly become larger than most countries, not just in terms of users but in terms of revenue (or GDP). As an example, Facebook's annual revenue today exceeds that of the vast majority of countries. Google has twice as much revenue as Facebook, and Amazon twice as much as Google.As most people in virtually every country are now participating directly and indirectly in digital economies, they've unwittingly become participants in a new world order of extractive economies. The result has been rapidly growing income inequality on a scale not seen in centuries.We believe the solution is a global digital economy that’s free of Wall Street and profit extraction, governed and controlled by the users of the platform using proven democratic concepts and norms.The lack of profit extraction in such a digital economy could enable a powerful and direct attack on income inequality, global poverty and climate change.
Through the power of social media and ecommerce, we have created mulitple, easy-to-access income streams available to even the most impoverished communities. Without Wall Street, we are free to use our profits to pay our users instead of hoarding them to increase an arbitrary stock price. Our goal is to provide the 4 billion people living off of $5 per day, up to $25 per day.
We have built a robust sharing platform that incentivizes our users to rent products from one another, rather than owning one of everything. Incentivized sustainability at this scale will significantly reduce pollution caused by mass manufacturing and mass transport.
We help in 3 ways:1.Guaranteed advertising- when a small business purchases advertising from us, we guarantee to provide 2x as much revenue as they spend2.Cheaper services - without Wall Street forcing us to prioritize quarter over quarter profits, we can provide services that are actually designed to help small business instead of exploit them, such as affordable delivery and e-commerce tools.3.New customers - Because our platform provides earnings to our users, our advertising becomes incredibly effective at generating new customers. The convenience of using the same platform to earn and spend provides the perfect audience for our small business partners to generate new customers.
We are over 20 years old and have gone through multiple phases. In the 2000s, we were known as SMS.ac. During this phase we created a mobile billing network such that anyone in the world could use their phone to make payments - a prerequisite to our future ambitions.In the early 2010s, we transitioned to our FanBox phase, where we began developing our social networkIn 2015, we launched Empowr and attracted 800,000 users from all over the world. This was an alpha test of the social network and a testing ground for dozens of concepts and new technologies. After 5 years of innovation, we shut down Empowr to focus on our go-to-market strategy, which brought us into the Movement era. Fast forward 4 years and we are now ready to take our platform to the world.
The Movement: Technologists and university professors combining forces to fight income inequality, global poverty and climate changeHeadquarters: San Diego, CaliforniaManaging Co-Founder: Mike PoustiPresident: Chuck TrautmanProject start date: October 2000Mission statement: To empower people by enabling opportunity, hope, influence and unityOverarching Goal: Help 4B people earn a minimum of $25/day Approach: Give the world a robust best-in-class digital economy that’s free of Wall Street and profit extraction, governed and controlled by the users of the platform using democratic concepts and normsGo to market strategy: Empower and enable local executives (Territory Owners) globally to own, operate, monetize and sell territories. Market entry point: Colleges and universitiesCurrent status Completed development of best-in-class social commerce technology (engages and monetizes at higher levels than any other social product in existence) Currently have multiple university territory rollouts in all 50 states Have university territories in all Canadian provinces Recently opened territories in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand Future: We plan to be in 180 countries by December of 2025
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