Man, this'd be a legal nightmare if you ever needed to take funding or make important decisions. (Disclaimer: IANAL, but I just met with one, and spent a lot of time and a good chunk of change dealing with having too many founders.)
Problem is, there are many decisions - like taking investment, or big partner deals, or top management changes - that require shareholder consent. If you have lots of non-involved shareholders, you've gotta send out shareholder vote notices to all of them and hope they come back. Without the signatures, you can't do anything.
Plus, if any of your shareholders have a conflict of interest (say, your product falls under their IP agreement), you potentially have a legal problem on your hands.
You can ameliorate this somewhat with a voting trust or various other legal arrangements that I know little about. Check with a lawyer to make sure. But it just sounds like a really bad idea to me.
I don't know if it would make sense, but Cambrian House set up a co-op so that they could do this. It owns 1% of the company and is made up of 2 ch employees and 3 community members. If you need more info, you should contact them and I'm sure they'd be happy to explain it to you.
Problem is, there are many decisions - like taking investment, or big partner deals, or top management changes - that require shareholder consent. If you have lots of non-involved shareholders, you've gotta send out shareholder vote notices to all of them and hope they come back. Without the signatures, you can't do anything.
Plus, if any of your shareholders have a conflict of interest (say, your product falls under their IP agreement), you potentially have a legal problem on your hands.
You can ameliorate this somewhat with a voting trust or various other legal arrangements that I know little about. Check with a lawyer to make sure. But it just sounds like a really bad idea to me.