When Two People Drink from the Same Source

Flipping Property Ownership on its Head

Here is another beautiful and inspiring Gaianet match-making story for you – with sparks flying, instant recognition and excitement and ... more awesomeness to be born through this new partnership.

Who?

Dakotah Apostolou is the co-founder of Cohere and its current CEO. His passion is radical collaboration. His mission is to accelerate the regenerative moment, by providing tuned spaces and places for change makers to activate each other and each other’s work and, through that, to build a global and coherent field that can meet the challenges of our times.

Thomas Thomison is the founder of Holocracy. He advances self-organisation and decentralisation in business and organisations. Since 2007 he has been exploring unequal power dynamics, reinventing current structures and steering toward Holocracy, where there are no privileges, no bosses, where no person is more special than another and where purpose becomes the new boss.

The Theme or “The Fire”

Gaianet’s powerful network is about connecting people that stoke the same fire, so that together we can grow strong roots for the new earth we are manifesting. The fire that Thomas and Dakotah are stoking is de-centralisation of power in the wider sense and de-centralisation of property ownership specifically. Put differently, both Thomas and Dakotah are passionate about identifying unequal power and ownership dynamics in our social structures and coming up with creative solutions that hand the power back to humanity as a whole.

Before the match-making

Before the match-making was Gaianet, of course. And there was Daan, who knew both. Daan, one of the founders of Gaianet, has a great gift and intuition for connecting the right people:

I saw the bridge between both of them. They are trying to accomplish the same thing: fractional ownership of houses so you can live freely in many places and also make money and go to places with curated community. It was a no-brainer to connect the two as they both create something new and similar that solves some serious issues we need to solve in our societies.
Daan Gorter

Both Thomas and Dakotah were just ‘doing their thing’ and not specifically looking for a business partner or collaborator. However, Thomas had expanded his venture for equalising power imbalances into the area of property, with his more recent project called Powershift Property. His research into this new field brought Cohere, Dakotah’s project, into his view, and he was interested to find out more. Thomas did not have a formal connection with Cohere then, and this is where Daan came in.

The Meeting

The introduction happened via email and was followed by a series of calls.

For Thomas, meeting Dakotah was an experience of, as he said, of “syncing into the same source with someone, syncing into the same thing that wants to be born into the world – liberation.” They both knew after the first call that, as Thomas called it, they “drink from the same source.”

When Dakotah and I started speaking, sparks were flying because we were using exactly the same language, even though we had never met ..!
Thomas Thomison

Thomas holds collaboration at the core. It was very easy to feel comfortable sharing all the unique things we have been working on because there was a strong sense that he holds that we are stronger together.
Dakotah Apostolou

There was so much resonance between the two that it felt worth exploring whether there could be an equally deep resonance between Powershift Properties and Cohere.

The Result

We laughed when Thomas shared how so often, after networking events, conferences and the match-making of people there can be a LOT of excitement and talk about what could grow from this connection, but most of the time, nothing ever comes from it ...

In this case, it was clearly different. The sparks that started flying from the first encounters did indeed light a fire between the two and it was clear that going forward it is just a question of what exactly the next steps in this newly established collaboration would be.

There were more calls, the desire to meet in person and exciting questions of “what can be done together?!” What wants to be brought into the world through the meeting of Cohere (Dakotah) and Powershift Properties (Thomas)? How can we, together, move our vision forward of changing the dynamics and power imbalances of property ownership?

The experience of the matchmaking

Dakotah described it as “an experience of how potent it is when networks like Gaianet exist and leaders like Daan are able to connect the right people at just the right time.”

For Thomas, transparency and visibility are essential and one of the key elements of self-organisation. For that reason, it also stood out for him that I showed up to document the story. “I light up when someone like you, Hanna, comes and says can we make this visible? That is huge. That does not happen very often.”

I would like to end with a special thanks to Gaianet and all who support this network! Speaking to Thomas and Dakotha was incredibly inspiring, uplifting and energising and the conversation left me with a warm and happy feeling of “yes! we can shift this story of humanity, we are already shifting it.