This is Mal, who helped set up Biome Collective – a co-operative started in 2015 that’s made up of creative technologists, artists, academics, and researchers. 

Mal told me that running the company in this non-traditional manner means they’re a lot more stable than a traditional startup

He says it puts them in a position to do projects independent of each other, which gives more creative control, freedom, and opens the doors to a lot more collaborations.

But I was interested to find out how they went about balancing this. Can a collection of freelancers be as tightly bound to a company as, say, employees can? How does a company like the Biome Collective ensure that its main work actually gets done alongside all the freelance projects going on?