Cosign #0 — Eight Hours, Eight Points

The origin story of the model: one hour, one point — invented at a studio’s first hour, proven over a decade, and now handed to student founders.

Ten years ago, after the first eight hours of work, an entire studio project was worth eight points of equity — all of them held by one person, because one person had done all eight hours. One hour, one point. That was the whole cap table.

Nobody taught us that split. We reasoned it out because it was the only one we could look at straight and not flinch: the hour is the unit, every hour counts the same on the same terms, and what you own is simply your hours against everyone’s. Then we ran it — for a decade, across a wall of collaborators, without a single equity dispute.

Cosign #0 is that story, told once so we never have to explain it cold again: where the model came from, the receipts that prove it, the tradition it turned out to belong to, and the offer it became.

The rule that never broke

Three lines, and they haven’t changed since hour eight:

  • One hour of work is one point. Not the founder’s hour worth more, not the specialist’s. The same point for the same hour, on the same schedule.
  • Cash buys down points. Take guaranteed pay for an hour and that hour earns fewer points — continuously, on a published curve, not in a one-time grant nobody can audit later.
  • Ownership is your points ÷ the whole pool — recomputed every time anyone logs an hour. If you can divide, you can read the cap table.

The decade of receipts

We publish our own ledger in full — every hour, every rate, every point — so that nobody we build with ever has to publish theirs. As of July 2026 it holds 14,772 logged hours and 13,012 points, with $117,825 in real cash paid to collaborators along the way. Three things that table proves that a pitch deck can’t:

  1. The founder’s 76.04% was earned at the same rate as every other stake — 9,894 hours, 9,894 points, one point per hour, the identical rate on the top line and every line beneath it.
  2. Cash and equity trade in the open. Every dollar of that $117,825 bought down the point rate on the hours it paid for — the same person can hold full-rate points from zero-cash hours and reduced-rate points from paid hours, side by side on one ledger.
  3. The system survives contact with reality — a decade, five schedules, ten contributor lines, and zero equity disputes.

It’s all there, in a table you can audit with a calculator: the published pool →

The tradition we turned out to be part of

At GDC 2026, a talk — “Co-Ops Are the Future” — put a name on what we’d been doing since hour eight. Allocating ownership by the labor people actually contribute is the patronage principle of the cooperative tradition; pricing every human hour the same is the idea behind time-banking. Both are older than the light bulb.

We make no claim to have improved on two centuries of practice. We reinvented one corner of it, independently, and ran it long enough to trust it — and we think that’s the strongest endorsement a model can get: it’s what you land on when you reason honestly from scratch.

Now it’s an offer

Here’s what we’re doing with a model we proved on our own project for ten years: we’re pointing it at student founders.

If you’re an undergraduate team with something you’d build if someone would just build it with you — we will, for zero cash. Your project becomes a co-op. Our hours log at the same rate yours do. You hold the votes from day one. And when it ships, we hand you the keys — the repo, the domains, the accounts, all of it. That’s the bylaws, not a promise.

Then we do it again, next season.

Applications open October 2026. Read the two conditions, the rubric, and who it’s for — then apply: apply to the Cosign →