[MUSIC] Democracy brewing, we get the name because we're
a work-around company and democratically governed.
We really wanted to recreate the public house and
for us that meant going back once upon a time.
There was a third place that wasn't the church, wasn't your home.
It was a place where the entire community would come together.
They've come together to drink beer and eat food and listen to music.
But even more than that,
it was to pass the hat for people in the community that might
be a need and also talk about what was going on in the community,
what needed to be done about it.
The first time I walked into the brewery here, I was like, wow,
these guys really pulled it off and really did it
because it's an incredible space they've created.
I know it was a difficult journey for them having seen them go through it.
From my standpoint, it's just really gratifying having known what they went
through and also steam the work that students did to help make that become a reality.
To be able to actually walk into somewhere and see
what was achieved is really really exciting.
Harvard Transactional Law Clinics is a clinical program within
Harvard Law School in which second and third year law students,
provide transactional legal services to live clients while they're in law school.
We put the most part,
represent companies and help them navigate
the legal and regulatory process of establishing themselves as a business,
where they are to be experts in the corporate law for these entities.
Part of TLC's mission is to provide assistance to
businesses in the community that are supporting community economic development,
and that was very consistent with what these guys were doing this.
My background's community in labor organizing and I ended up getting really
burnt out on fighting problems and really wanted to more solution focused.
What I had seen that work best in the past was worker ownership
and actually having leadership that as the answer to the folks that they lead.
The workers can become the actual owners
and take care of the business and learn all aspects out there.
We all utilize each other's skill sets to accomplish tasks.
Some of the challenges that we did at the very beginning was monetary,
just we didn't have a lot of resources.
Yeah, most people who start a business used a friends and family money
and me and Jason's friends and family don't have a lot of money,
and so a big part of a year was just us basically pitching to the community,
having tastings and talking to folks on what we wanted to do and slowly building up.
One of the ways that companies tend to raise money
a lot of the time is by selling ownership interests in the company.
Because they were so dedicated to being worker own,
they weren't able to go out and say,
sell equity to investors.
The direct public offering that Harvard was able to do for us
really allowed us to collect a lot of money for people in the greater Boston area,
which then really created a massive cheerleading squad for us.
A lot of our initial investors are our customers on a very regular basis.
This project was challenging and a stretch for our clients who certainly
had not taken on a project such as direct public offering.
We couldn't find many examples of it being done before.
For me, it was my first real example of
translating something that I've learned very theoretically in a law school class,
that I took to actually doing it in practice.
I'd taken a course on securities laws and regulations,
but then going into this and actually getting my hands into it and
seeing how that works out in practice was entirely different.
We just had our one-year anniversary.
We have 31 employees,
and we now have 11 Porphyromonas.
I think at the end of the day,
we want to be a showcase for democracy in the workplace.
We really don't want to be preachy, but on the other hand,
we want to have folks once they leave here,
but that was the best burger and beer pattern a very long time.
It's pretty amazing that those are the people who actually waited on me.
People actually made it,
are all the owners here,
and that's a real interesting difference. [MUSIC] [BACKGROUND]