Twenty-five people are offered one percent of the company each. Here is exactly how they are chosen, and why it has nothing to do with luck, and why we can only run it in Europe for now.
Contributions are open now; the contest follows. We are assembling the jury and having the foundation that holds the certificates set up by a notary, and neither is worth rushing. These rules are published in full now so you can read them long before you decide anything.
Entries open on 1 December 2026 and close on 11 January 2027. Every contributor gets an email two weeks beforehand. If for any reason the contest has not opened by 1 March 2027, every contributor is refunded in full, which is set out in section 9b of the terms.
Answer one question in your own words. An independent jury reads every answer and selects twenty-five. Those twenty-five are each offered one percent of Dijkstra B.V..
It costs nothing to enter. Contributing money to The M1llion does not enter you, does not help you, and does not hurt you. The two things are deliberately unconnected.
People involved in running them1llion, the jury and their immediate families cannot enter.
Why Europe only, and why the contribution is different
Contributing is open to anyone anywhere. The contest is not, because what is offered here is shares, and offering shares to the public is regulated separately in every country. Doing that properly in one regime is achievable now. Doing it in fifty is not, and doing it badly would put the whole project at risk.
So a contributor in Brazil or Japan is a full part of the experiment and appears in the ledger like everyone else. They just cannot be one of the twenty-five yet. We intend to widen this and we will say so here when we can.
Entries open on 1 December 2026 and stay open for six weeks, closing at 23:59 Amsterdam time on 11 January 2027. Late entries are not read, however good they are. Both dates are fixed and announced at least two weeks before entries open, so nobody has to watch this page.
You submit your name, email address, country and an answer to this question:
What would you do with one percent of a company built to help people?
Maximum two hundred words. Any language, we translate. Written by you: entries that are obviously generated wholesale are scored on what they are, which is not much.
The jury is made up entirely of people from outside the organisation. Nobody who works on The M1llion or stands to gain from the outcome sits on it or votes.
The five members are being confirmed and will be named here, in full, before entries open on 1 December 2026. For each one we publish who they are, what they do, and any connection they have to Dijkstra B.V. or to anyone involved. Nobody reads a single entry until that page is public: naming the jury after the judging would defeat the purpose of having one.
Entries are scored without names attached. The jury sees the answer, not who wrote it.
Every entry is scored out of one hundred by at least three jurors independently. The scores are averaged, and the twenty-five highest form the ranked shortlist. How many of those twenty-five end up with a place depends on the pot, as section 6 explains.
| Criterion | Weight |
|---|---|
| How clearly and specifically you describe what you would do | 40 |
| What it would change for people other than you | 30 |
| What you would bring beyond the stake itself: time, skill, network | 30 |
If two entries tie for the last place on the shortlist, the jury re-reads both and decides between them on the first criterion. A tie is never broken by drawing lots, by timestamp, or by anything else outside the merit of the entry.
The scoring sheet, anonymised, is published after the announcement so anyone can see how the selection was reached.
On 25 February 2027 we publish the ranked shortlist in a public livestream: the twenty-five highest scoring entries, in order, with the recording staying online. Everyone on the list is contacted directly by email the same day.
Why a ranked list rather than twenty-five winners
The number of places depends on the final size of the pot, and that is not known until the experiment ends. Announcing twenty-five names in February and then discovering the pot only supports twelve would be indefensible, so we do it the other way round.
Each place is confirmed as the pot passes its step of 40,000. At 40,000 the first name on the list is confirmed, at 80,000 the second, and so on up to twenty-five at a million. Every confirmation is announced publicly on the day it happens.
Where the pot already stands above a step on announcement day, those places are confirmed immediately.
If someone on the list cannot be reached within fourteen days of their place being confirmed, or declines it, the next entry on the list takes that place. The list itself does not change after the announcement: nobody is added, reordered or removed on any other ground.
This matters, so it is stated plainly rather than buried.
A game of chance is one where the participant cannot meaningfully influence the outcome. Here, the outcome depends entirely on what you write and how a jury scores it against published criteria. There is no draw, no lot, no random element at any stage, including tie-breaks. Two people who write the same answer get the same score.
Nor is there any payment attached. Entry is free and always will be, and paying us money gives you no entry and no advantage. We built it this way deliberately: the moment a payment buys a chance at something, it stops being an experiment and becomes a lottery.
Open point for your lawyer
This section is the whole legal argument. Have it confirmed in writing that the design counts as a contest of skill rather than a promotional game of chance, and keep that advice on file. If any random element ever creeps into the selection or the tie-break, the argument collapses and the prize cap for promotional games applies.
Each selected entrant is offered one percent of Dijkstra B.V., the company behind them1llion, held as certificates through STAK Dijkstra. Up to twenty-five percent in total, set aside before a single euro came in.
How many places there are depends on the pot
Twenty-five places over one million works out at one place for every 40,000 raised. That is a division of the goal, not a price: nothing is sold and no place is bought. If the million is reached, all twenty-five on the shortlist get a place. If it is not, the pot is divided by 40,000 and rounded down: 750,000 confirms the top eighteen, 400,000 the top ten.
This does not change how you are judged or what you write. It changes only how far down the scored list we go. The final number is announced before the results, so nobody is scored against a target that moved afterwards. Section 9 of the terms has the detail.
Any tax on receiving or holding the stake is yours to handle, and depends on where you live. We cannot advise you on it and will say so if you ask.
We can void an entry if it is submitted more than once by the same person, if it is not the entrant's own work, if it contains material that is unlawful or targets someone, or if the entrant cannot confirm their identity when selected. We will say why, in writing.
We use your name, email and country to run the contest and to contact you if you are selected. Entries are scored anonymously. We publish the first names and countries of the twenty-five, and the anonymised scoring sheet for everyone else. Nothing is sold or used for advertising. Full detail is in our privacy statement.
Entries that are not selected are deleted twelve months after the announcement.
If you think the process went wrong, email hello@them1llion.com within thirty days of the announcement and we will respond in writing. The jury's scoring is final, but how the process was run is a fair thing to question and we would rather answer it than not.
Dutch law applies. These rules sit alongside our terms; where the two conflict on anything about the contest, these rules win.