The Privacy and Governance Vote
The Privacy and Governance Vote was a KmikeyM shareholder resolution posted by Mike Merrill on August 2, 2025. It asked shareholders to approve a formal, tiered governance framework for handling confidential projects that could not be disclosed publicly at the time of initiation. The vote was prompted by Merrill’s involvement in Blippo+, which had required extended confidentiality during development. It passed with 86% in favor, 14% voting to revise, and 1% opposed, across 24 participating shareholders holding 5,051 shares.
The vote is notable as the formalization of a pattern that had existed informally since The New Opportunity Vote in 2013. For twelve years, KmikeyM’s handling of confidential opportunities had been ad-hoc: Merrill would post a vague proposal, brief major shareholders privately if they asked, and trust the community to approve or reject based on limited public information. The Privacy and Governance Vote proposed to replace that improvisation with a written protocol.
Background
Blippo+ was announced publicly in 2024 but had been in development for years before that. Merrill’s executive producer role required him to keep the project confidential during its earliest phases. Unlike the Chroma launch in 2013, which was a single binary decision (quit Panic or not), Blippo+ was an ongoing multi-year commitment that evolved without any natural moment for a shareholder vote.
By mid-2025, Merrill had accumulated enough experience with confidential projects to see that the existing KmikeyM system had a gap. The shareholder vote mechanism worked well for transparent decisions (diet, politics, relationships) and could be stretched to cover one-time confidential decisions (Chroma), but it had no framework for sustained confidential work where the facts of the project were themselves the thing under NDA.
The proposal
The resolution proposed three governance tiers, determined by the scale of the time commitment involved:
| Tier | Trigger | Governance Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| Mike Acts Alone | ~2 to 5 hours per week, for one month or less | No vote required. Merrill uses personal discretion. |
| Board Oversight | ~5 to 10 hours per week, for more than one week | Requires oversight from a designated shareholder board, which can be briefed under confidentiality. |
| Coded Disclosure | More than 10 hours per week, for more than one week | Requires a shareholder vote, with the proposal framed in coded or generalized language where the specific details cannot be shared publicly. |
The idea was to make the level of shareholder involvement proportional to the size of the commitment, while preserving the ability to take on confidential work at all. Small side projects no longer needed a vote. Medium-sized projects could go to a smaller trusted group. Large commitments still required a shareholder vote, but under a formalized process that acknowledged the confidentiality constraint up front.
The vote options
Shareholders had three choices:
- Yes: Adopt the proposed protocol
- No: Continue relying on Merrill’s personal discretion
- Revise: Support the concept but recommend specific adjustments
In response to early shareholder comments during the voting period, Merrill refined the proposal’s duration limits: “no more than a month” for the Mike Acts Alone tier, and “a week” minimum for the Board Oversight and Coded Disclosure tiers. The vote proceeded with these clarifications in place.
The vote
Yes: 86% Revise: 14% No: 1% Total participants: 24 users with 5,051 shares
The top three shareholders by weight in the vote were Doug (2,775 shares), chrishiggins (752 shares), and beau (538 shares). The proposal passed with an overwhelming majority. The 14% who voted Revise recorded qualified support rather than opposition, signaling that the framework was directionally right but that specific parameters were debatable.
Significance
The Privacy and Governance Vote represents a maturation point for KmikeyM. The platform was originally designed around the idea that shareholder transparency was the whole point. Over time, Merrill’s career accumulated situations where full transparency was impossible: an accelerator under NDA, a long-term creative project with a traditional publisher, a consulting relationship with a private company. Each of these required Merrill to either pass up the opportunity, violate a third-party confidentiality agreement, or ask shareholders to trust him without the usual information.
The tiered framework is an attempt to make that last option legitimate and repeatable. It acknowledges something that KmikeyM had previously resisted naming: that a publicly traded person still has private information, and the shareholder contract needs to account for that. The protocol formalizes how much privacy is acceptable at what scale.
It is also the clearest example to date of KmikeyM reforming its own governance through its own mechanism. The shareholders were being asked to approve a change in how they would vote on future changes.