We need tech funding without venture capital | Wouter Tebbens (DWeb Camp)

Wouter Tebbens has spent more than 20 years building open source and cooperative alternatives to big tech, including a cooperative cloud service in Barcelona and a member-owned alternative to Zoom. At DWeb Camp he helped launch the Democratic Tech Fund, which wants to pay for community tech through crowdfunding and match funding instead of venture capital.

We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. Wouter explains why he now calls big tech "MAGA" and why he doubts Europe can protect itself by building its own Google. We also go back to the early days of the Free Knowledge Institute and the commons movement in Barcelona after 15M. He's honest about the hard parts too, like how long the teams behind these cooperatives worked on precarious pay before the projects could support them.

Wouter Tebbens is the founder of the Free Knowledge Institute in Amsterdam and one of the partners behind the Democratic Tech Fund. He has helped start several tech cooperatives, including the Commons Cloud and Meet.coop.

Democratic Tech Fund - https://democratictech.fund

0:00 Introduction1:33 Wouter's Lore2:49 Why DWeb Camp?9:59 The Democratic Tech Fund21:50 Origins of the Free Knowledge Institute27:25 The Barcelona Cooperative Ecosystem31:25 Building Cooperative Tech: Tips & Pitfalls39:57 Network Effects in Cooperative Models