By Benjamin Bradley
Benjamin is a co-founder of Polycot Associates (now Resolana CoLaboratory), member-owner, and senior developer.
Polycot Associates has been a worker-owned web development agency since 2014. In the 11 years since then, the membership has changed as owners retired and new ones joined the business. Ten years later, I was the last of the original four founders of the cooperative.
We had expanded from an Austin-based business to a fully virtual workplace with co-owners in three US states and Mexico City. By its nature, a worker-owned cooperative business exists to serve its members. It should change and adapt to meet their evolving needs as the membership changes.
But even with this conceptual awareness, to some people it still felt like a company created by other people a long time ago. In 2024, we decided it was time for a rebrand. We would update the logo and the website to something that felt more like “ours.”
Meanwhile, the tech industry was contracting hard, with mass layoffs in the news every month. Large language models (LLMs) were learning to write code, and applying the wisdom of Two Minute Papers’ Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér, who says, “Don’t judge a technology by where it is now, but where it will be two papers in the future.”, I could read the writing on the wall: the web development industry is dead. Last year (2025), there was a lot of chaos as new products were launched every week, but in 2026, some of these products will have weathered the storm, and you’ll be able to talk to your website and tell it what to change. For 99% of use cases, you won’t need a web development agency anymore.
This uncertainty about our industry contributed to a negative feedback loop: demoralization led to slow sales, which led to further demoralization. We talked around the issues in our weekly ownership meetings for what felt like months. People made suggestions, but nothing caught the group’s attention enough to make a difference. In 2025, the industry itself was still in upheaval, with no clear path forward yet. This was about the time that an acquaintance of mine published an article on Dealing with Uncertainty. Inspired by her wisdom, I realized our company needed more than just a rebrand.
What could we do? The business was not working anymore. We considered breaking up the business. Maybe we should call it quits and go our separate ways….