Rethinking Ownership with Katie & Brian Boland
Katie & Brian Boland, Co-Founders, Delta Fund & Unlock Ownership
On this episode of Ethical Exits, Hannah sits down with Katie & Brian Boland, Co-Founders and CEO of Delta Fund and Unlock Ownership. Katie and Brian are economic activists and strategists challenging how we think about capital, power, and ownership.
They unpack a term they coined: equity washing. Think greenwashing, but for employee ownership. What happens when workers receive some economic upside, but little meaningful governance, agency, or long-term control?
From there, the conversation moves to the bigger question: What does real ownership actually look like?
Katie and Brian offer a simple framework:
Who owns? Who benefits? Who decides?
Together, they explore employee ownership, private equity, governance, stewardship, capital, and why founders should start thinking about ownership transition years before they are ready to exit.
Because an exit does not just transfer an asset. It transfers power.
About Katie & Brian Boland
Katie and Brian came to this work from very different vantage points.
Brian spent 11 years at Facebook, rising to senior leadership and helping build major parts of the company before leaving and later becoming a prominent whistleblower and public critic of the company’s practices.
Katie is a former science teacher and science department chair whose work moved deeply into philanthropy and systems change. Through years of funding and learning alongside communities, she began questioning why philanthropy so often treats poverty, education, racial inequity, health, and economic opportunity as separate problems rather than examining the structures underneath them.
After Facebook’s IPO, Katie and Brian also found themselves with a front-row seat to the wealth-management system. Financial and philanthropic advisers presented them with sophisticated strategies for minimizing taxes, preserving wealth, and maximizing what they could pass on to their children.
Their response was essentially: What if those are not our goals?
That question has shaped the work they do today: using their capital, voice, and experience to challenge assumptions about wealth, ownership, philanthropy, and power while investing in and helping build alternatives.
👉 To learn more about their work, Katie and Brian on LinkedIn or visit Delta Fund, subscribe to their writing, and explore their donor-advised fund, Unlock Ownership.
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At Ethical Exits, we champion profit-for-purpose capitalism, leveraging business as a force for scaling philanthropy and meaningful change.
In each episode, we ask guests to highlight a cause close to their heart. Katie and Brian chose to spotlight citizens’ assemblies, a democratic model that brings representative groups of community members together to learn, deliberate, and help shape decisions affecting their communities.
They specifically highlighted organizations like Civic Genius, which helps communities use deliberative democracy to tackle complex public issues.
As Brian described it, one of the most powerful outcomes is helping people rediscover that democracy can work.
🔗 Learn more or support their work:
https://citizensassemblies.org/
