The KmikeyM Launch
The KmikeyM Launch was the founding event of KmikeyM: on January 26, 2008, Mike Merrill divided himself into 100,000 shares, priced them at $1.00 each, and opened a market where anyone could buy a stake in his life and vote on his decisions. It was the first public offering of shares in a person, and the date is observed each year as the project’s Launch Anniversary.
Background
Merrill first recorded the idea of selling shares in himself on November 4, 2003, more than four years before he acted on it. The motivation was social rather than financial. Having moved to Portland, Oregon, he wanted to be part of a community of writers, musicians, and artists but felt he had no natural way in. As he later put it in his TEDxVienna talk, he had come to believe that “friendship is what happens when you’re doing something together with someone,” and he was looking for a structure that would let him do something together with people he admired.
Two influences gave the idea its shape. The first was net art, specifically etoy.CORPORATION. In 2007 Merrill became an ANGEL in etoy’s Mission Eternity project, running distributed-storage software that preserved the digital afterlives of deceased participants across a peer-to-peer network. KmikeyM inverted that architecture: the same shareholder-and-community-node mechanism, applied to a living subject instead of a dead one. The second influence was Warren Buffett’s annual Berkshire Hathaway letters to shareholders, a model of a principal communicating candidly with the people who hold a stake in him. Merrill’s twist was to flip the role he wanted to play. “I didn’t want to be the famous investor,” he has said. “I wanted to be the beloved and valuable company.”
The launch
On January 26, 2008, Merrill built his own exchange and listed shares of himself on it. The structure was simple and deliberate:
- 100,000 shares at $1.00 each. The figure came from valuing his own free time: he priced his nights and weekends at roughly $100,000 and divided that into one hundred thousand one-dollar shares.
- A real market. Rather than a symbolic gesture, the exchange let shareholders buy, sell, and trade at prices they set themselves, with no market-maker (see Share Price History).
- A dedicated account. Proceeds from share sales were held in a separate account and not spent on personal expenses.
- A non-voting founder. Merrill kept the overwhelming majority of shares but made his own holdings non-voting, so that all governance power belonged to outside shareholders.
The early days were modest and intentionally so. In the first ten days, twelve friends bought a combined 929 shares. Merrill began tentatively posting questions for shareholders to vote on, and the price soon doubled to $2. “Artists and writers and musicians that I knew were buying the shares and voting,” he recalled. “And I thought it worked. I’d ask the question, is this a way to be? And the answer was yes.”
What was new
The launch is often described as an IPO, and the shorthand is useful, but it was not an initial public offering in the securities sense. No company was issuing registered stock (see Governance and Legal Structure). What Merrill offered was something without a clean precedent: tradable, voting shares in a person’s life. The shareholder-as-art lineage running through etoy and similar net-art projects had imagined corporations as living things; KmikeyM made a living person into a tradable, governable one, and built a working marketplace to prove it could run.
Aftermath
The project grew slowly through word of mouth and press coverage. In 2009, investor Gordon S. bought $6,436 of shares and pushed the price to an all-time high of $11.75. In 2013, a feature in WIRED quadrupled the shareholder base past 500, the same year Merrill left Panic Inc. to co-found Chroma. The mechanism Merrill sketched in 2003 and launched in 2008 went on to govern apartment moves, relationships, diet, party registration, and the project’s most-covered moment, The Vasectomy Vote of 2013.
Legacy
January 26 is observed as the KmikeyM Launch Anniversary, the project’s annual marker and a recurring anchor for new initiatives. The launch established the three commitments that still define the platform: a real market with prices set by shareholders, binding votes that Merrill is obligated to honor, and a founder who holds the shares but not the votes. From a single day in 2008, those three rules have carried the project across eighteen years and more than 1,100 shareholders.
References
- Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share — Wired, 2013
- Putting the I in IPO — The Atlantic, 2013
- Mike Merrill Is a Publicly Traded Person — VICE, 2012
- How I Became the World’s First Publicly Traded Person — TEDxVienna, 2021
- Mission Eternity — ANGEL application — etoy.CORPORATION (conceptual predecessor)