Capital Was Never Only Money
My last post ended with a claim that I now owe you: the idea that capital was never only money.
The rest of the series is built on that idea, so it needs to be taken slowly. We’ll start today with what Collaborative Capital actually is, then over the next few weeks, we’ll go into detail on what it counts.
It is not a fund
Collaborative Capital is not a fund. It’s not a single product, and it’s not a slogan. It’s an operating system for the wider economy. A different way to answer one of the oldest questions in economics: what counts as capital, and who gets to own the returns?
The conventional answer is narrow. Capital is money, money is the only thing that creates a return, and everything else that goes into building something of value - the trust, labour, knowledge, land, culture, legitimacy, connection, is treated as mere scenery, a free input, a given.
It’s an elegant simplification, but like most simplifications, it works until it doesn’t.
Collaborative Capital begins from a wider and more honest premise: that value is created by many kinds of contribution, and often by many kinds of contributor, and that ownership of the result should be shared among the people who create it.
That’s the entire idea. Everything downstream is what happens when you take it seriously, one form of capital at a time.
Eight forms, at a glance
So far, I’ve identified eight different forms of capital. Over the next three weeks, I’ll discuss them in more detail, with real examples and some fantastic insights from some guest contributors.
This series is a living document, and I’d love any suggestions you may have. If any of my definitions have missed something, or you think there are other types of capital we should add to the list, please let me know, as this is the part most worth getting right.
But here they are at a glance, so the shape is visible before we walk through the detail.
Financial: money. The form the current system already counts.
Social: trust, reciprocity, the ability to convene.
Human: skill, labour, care, time, lived experience.
Intellectual: knowledge, data, methods, the commons.
Natural: the living world as a stakeholder, not an externality.
Cultural: identity, language, heritage, story.
Institutional: governance, legitimacy, the earned right to set the rules.
Network: the compounding value of being connected at all.
Extractive capital counts the first, and pockets the surplus from the others. Collaborative Capital proposes to make all eight legible, shareable and contributable.
Financial capital, first and briefest
I’ll start with money, deliberately, and keep it short, because that’s the point. Financial capital comes first because it is the one form the current system is built to recognise. Money still matters; nothing gets built without it.
Extractive capital treats it as the only capital that counts, the only contribution that earns a return, and often the only column on the balance sheet.
Collaborative Capital keeps money firmly in the mix, but reframes it as patient, pooled and co-owned rather than lent or extracted, one column among eight rather than the whole ledger.
That’s the ‘money’. Everything else in this part of the series covers the other types of capital that the current system doesn’t take into account, often preventing our most creative and collaborative minds from owning any part of what they make possible.
A picture, not a filing requirement
A quick word to add before anyone reaches for Excel… The eight ‘columns’ I mentioned earlier are a metaphor, a way of telling the story. No-one should be asked to file a balance sheet with eight columns or be forced to calculate depreciation on their social or human capital.
That way lies chaos, and large bills from consultants and auditors. The intent is the opposite.
Collaborative Capital is about lowering the barriers to taking part, not adding to the paperwork, so that the value people already create can count, and earn them a share of what it builds, without a new bureaucracy to certify it first.
Not everything needs a number
There is often a temptation, once you’ve named eight forms of capital, to rush off and put a figure on every one of them. Some of that is worth doing: you cannot manage what you cannot see, and making these forms legible is half the point. But it is worth being careful, because I have watched this go wrong.
I have seen a fair number of impact-measurement and impact-forecasting outfits at close range, and I have real respect for them. What they are attempting is hard and genuinely needed, and it is a step in the right direction.
But it carries a cost. It breeds bureaucracy. And when you force a hard number onto something that was never really a number, trust, care, cultural standing, you get a figure that looks precise but is quietly easy to game. The measure becomes the target, and stops measuring anything at all.
So the honest position is this: some of these forms can be counted, some are better weighed than counted, and some simply need to be kept in view and taken seriously.
Where those lines fall, and what a better instrument would look like, I don’t know yet.
That’s not a hole in the argument. This is a collaborative dialogue, and that is a major part of it, and one of the things I am asking you to help work out.
Next week: the two forms of capital you almost certainly already hold, but have probably never once been paid for as capital. Trust, and care.
If you had a magic wand
The standing question I ask in every meeting, and answer here every week: if you had a magic wand, what are the three things you’d need right now? Mine, this week:
The sharpest objection to treating collaboration itself as an asset class.
Real attempts to count non-financial capital that actually worked, in practice, at scale.
An economist willing to pressure-test the eight-capital framing before I build further on it.
Now you. What are your three? Send me a message with them, and tell me if there’s anything I can help with. I read every reply, and I answer.