Locke's Rule: You Mixed Your Labor, You Own It
John Locke had a theory of where property comes from that I think about constantly, because I work in an industry obsessed with the question and rarely honest about the answer. Locke said the world starts unowned. You acquire a thing by mixing your labor with it. Clear the field, plant it, work it — now it’s yours, not because a king said so, but because you put yourself into it. Ownership is congealed effort. The thing is yours to the exact degree your work is in it.
Cleanest theory of ownership ever written, and quietly violated everywhere in tech.
Look at who actually owns things. Locke would look at a modern company and be confused. The person who mixed the most labor into the product — wrote the core, held the architecture in their head, was awake when it broke — frequently owns the least of it. And the person who owns the most usually mixed in capital, not labor, and called that mixing. Locke had a slot for that, kind of, but he’d notice the gap, and the gap is where a builder’s whole strategic life gets decided.
Because the labor theory tells you something ruthless if you let it: equity is congealed labor, but only if you arrange for it to be. Your effort does not congeal into ownership by default. By default, in an employment relationship, your labor congeals into someone else’s property — that’s literally the deal, you trade the labor for a wage and they keep the asset. Locke describes the natural state. The wage relationship is a structure built specifically to interrupt the natural state, to route your mixed labor into their ownership and not yours.
Not moralizing here. It’s often a fair trade — predictable money now versus uncertain ownership later. But make the trade with open eyes, knowing exactly what it is. Every hour you mix your labor in, ask the Locke question: when this congeals into property, whose name is on it. Sometimes the honest answer is “theirs, and I’m fine with that, I’m being paid to not carry the risk.” Fine. But sometimes you’re mixing founder-grade labor into a thing and congealing it into someone else’s estate for a salaryman’s wage, and Locke would call that a bad trade even if your manager calls it loyalty.
The builder’s version is simple and it’s governed every real call I’ve made about where to put my hours: own where you labor most. If you’re going to pour the deepest version of yourself into something — the work actually congealing into significant value — you want a structure where that value flows back to you. Not every hour needs this. But your best hours, your founder-grade hours, should mix into something with your name on the cap table, not just your name on the commit.
Locke thought property was natural, pre-political, yours by the simple fact of your effort. He was describing a wilderness. We live in a wilderness someone else already fenced. The whole game is noticing which side of the fence your labor is congealing on — and, when it matters most, building inside your own fence.
You mixed your labor. The only question is who Locke would say owns the field. Make sure it’s you, where it counts.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.