Reflections from the Purpose Trust Ownership Conference
By Julie Menter, Program Director
Last week, I attended the Purpose Trust Ownership Conference with 150 other investors, lawyers, business owners, and field builders, in Austin, TX. Together, we spent two days around the joint intention of helping Perpetual PurposeTrust (PPT) scale up. Three themes surfaced for me.
1. Growing capital and pipeline of deals at the same pace
I moderated a panel on innovative financing for PPT transitions with Dana Stranz (RSF Social Finance), Joe Pileri (Mission Driven Finance), and Matthias Pries (WES). The core challenge: PPTs require genuinely different capital. Because PPTs are typically asset-locked—meaning the company can’t be sold—any equity investment can’t rely on a future sale and instead needs to be structured differently. And because the business owner has transferred their shares to the trust, there's no individual owner to personally guarantee a loan, which puts these deals outside the comfort zone of most conventional small business lenders. In short, traditional financing is a poor fit.
Innovative workarounds are emerging, like debt secured by future cashflows, and a growing number of mission-driven lenders are actively looking for PPT deals, including long-time worker cooperative lenders such as LEAF and Shared Capital Cooperative. Many PPT transitions to date haven't required outside capital at all — but as the model grows, external financing will become increasingly important. The opportunity, as several investors on the panel noted, will be to grow capital and pipeline at the same pace, while building the evidence base and growing deal standardization to attract a broader set of financial institutions.
2. Structure and culture go hand-in-hand
Many of the CEOs in the room already had profit sharing, open-book management, and meaningful employee engagement in place before converting to PPTs. The structure can enshrine those practices permanently. But as Ari Weinzweig’s framing on succession reminded me, there are distinct dimensions to get right—governance, cultural, legal, and economic—and a PPT only addresses the legal piece. You need all of them working together, and none is sufficient on its own. As we saw when OpenAI’s board fired and then re-hired Sam Altman back in 2023, structure is necessary but not sufficient to protect a company's mission.
3. PPTs as one option in a wider landscape of alternatives
A useful thread at the conference was the balance between developing deep PPT-specific expertise and keeping an eye on adjacent alternative ownership models that might serve some businesses better. Alex Amouyel, from Newman’s Own, introduced Josh Baron’s Owner Strategy Triangle as a way to prioritize needs. It outlines how owners, when planning for succession, must always trade off between liquidity, growth, and control, and can’t have all three. For many business owners, naming that trade-off explicitly is clarifying. Broadly clarifying priorities can open up a broader conversation: PPTs, steward ownership, employee ownership, conventional exits to private equity—each serves a different goal. Understanding the full landscape of conventional and alternative exits is helpful for business leaders as they consider what option to pursue.
Learning from the past to imagine the future
Mark Hand closed the conference with an inspiring call to action: “radical times call for prophetic work.” Drawing on the book We Survived the End of the World which points to four Indigenous prophets who helped their people learn strategies for surviving catastrophe, Mark drew lessons for the growth of this work in deeply uncertain times: radically change culture, build new prototypes, consider overlooked stakeholders, and build together. The infrastructure being built here—legal, financial, cultural—isn’t just technical scaffolding, It’s a bet on a different, better, future.
I came away from the conference with a sense of something new taking shape with an enthusiastic community of practice building around it. I’m grateful to be a part of it!
