Does this all really just come down in your mind to a "good founder" exercising their will and moral fiber and grit to execute a truly humanistic app/service to make the world better? I'm not saying it's not possible, but the prevailing system and incentives strongly, strongly favor inhumane values, so you need to work *against* that system to express well-being-oriented values.
Working against capitalism isn't what most tech founders have in mind and isn't going to lead to the kind of success most want/envision. We do have a few examples of people doing this and they're inspiring; I would love to see more founders following in the footsteps of Jimmy Wales, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, Sal Khan, and the like, or even Brewster Kahle (who founded and exited several companies and basically amassed wealth then used that position to found the Internet Archive), but it's a rarified path. Many of these people do not have large salaries, they're not huge in the public eye (Wales is known but not anywhere near as famous as Bezos, Altman, etc.), and perhaps most critically, most of what they've founded are *nonprofits*. While that business model obviously exists within capitalism, it operates in a way that is essentially counter to the core values and tenets of capitalism - it is an anomaly. Do you believe that a tech founder truly can create a for-profit company that deeply values and expresses human wellbeing and also becomes a significant financial success? If so what are some examples?
I'm all for the core message here, but once again it feels like it ignores or at least elides the forces that largely orient our founders and the companies they create toward configurations that are harmful to humanity. Individual agency and choice has a role, but is dramatically overemphasized in the telling here, in my view.
Oshyan—love your feedback! Your comments are always so thoughtful.
I would argue that the world is hungry for beauty, craft, and purpose, but it takes a superhuman level of skill and grit to wrench it into being. Educating users on the value while also building competitive product is very hard. It is so hard that the default path—the one sold by the startup industrial complex—doesn't really talk about it. My goal with The Leverage is to equip the technologists who read this publication the moral framework, knowledge, and purpose to put in that extra effort in care.
So yes, I believe it is possible to build large, profitable companies that exhibit craft, care, and beauty. You can care deeply about the world and about the product at once. As far as examples go maybe worthy of a full post? But consumer brands I think that exemplify this are MSCHF, Patagonia, Costco. I also think it is possible on the SaaS front for companies like Notion, Mercury, Linear, Framer, Not Boring Software (you'll note how many of those companies I've selected as sponsors!). Explicit social change doesn't have to be the purpose of every company.
Thanks, and I appreciate the examples. Yes, Patagonia is now a classic, likewise Costco. I wasn't that familiar with MSCHF, but they seem much smaller scale and earlier in their journey. Maybe they'll get there as shining examples of this sort of thing, but I feel like they need to make bigger impact first? I would love a full post on inspiring examples in this space for sure!
Yet one could argue that Patagonia is virtuous in name only. While their communication emphasizes selling durable and recycled goods, in reality, the company sells considerable amounts of recycled plastic. It might be better than other brands, yet buying and diffusing microplastics from their recycled bags and other items is still harmful. But the founder is cool and the campaigns are fresh.
I think this illustrates precisely my point: Patagonia *is* a stand-out example, and *compared to other companies* they are "good". But evaluated on the basis of negative impact on the world vs. positive impact on humanity it's not all that impressive, i.e. not that "good", objectively speaking. In other words if you think of the absolute biggest positive impact on humanity that a company could have and compare Patagonia to that it falls well short. But this IS just about the best that capitalism can offer on balance! And Patagonia is a significant outlier in that the pro-humanity choices they made are rare in the for-profit world and just happened to still result in good profits through a combination of factors, at least some of which appear to just be good fortune. There are plenty of other examples of companies that had an arguably bigger positive impact on the world, but they also tend to come with bigger negatives too. The evaluations, metrics, and incentives are wrong in this system, plain and simple.
That path you outlined is the only I see possible. "Beating the game" and amassing enough wealth to then be able to ignore the game altogether.
I certainly would be building something different if I didn't feel like I have to beat the game first. And I think that's the case for most founders who don't want to achieve unicorn-level wealth. They just want the financial freedom to build ventures that have a positive impact.
Yeah, that makes sense and is certainly more inspiring and supportable to me vs. the pursuit of unicorn status. It's a pragmatic decision and as long as you are able to maintain that vision and grounding even if you reach success, and thus ultimately you *do* exit and then go on to use your resources to do something more values-oriented, then it's great. It doesn't seem to happen often, unfortunately.
Personally I'm more interested in seeing if there is commonality and potentially effective alternative strategy behind the few examples of people who *didn't* take that route, Linus Torvalds being one of the few examples I can really think of. Jimmy Wales started in finance, Brewster Kahle founded and exited at least one major tech company prior, and both used their existing resources to make their respective humanity-projects a reality (Wikipedia, The Internet Archive). I'm grateful that both of them chose the path they ultimately did, but I'm hopeful that it is not a necessary starting point to make a pile of money before contributing meaningfully to humanity. Perhaps some examples of that narrow path might be Eugen Rochko (Mastodon), Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap), and Ton Roosendaal (Blender)...
There are founders out there trying to figure out how to make something that's not just about profit, but they aren't backed by funding. And if they have the privilege to try and take a go at it, the only realistic way they have to get their products out there is by playing into the games of algorithms that thrive on click-bait, fear-mongering, and polarizing takes. Most who are motivated to build something that actually matters lose all motivation when they face the reality of what they have to do to get noticed.
That is the challenge (and the opportunity). Founders have to take the lessons of the last twelve years and make something beautiful that is competitive with the slop. It requires toughness/craftiness on a whole different level. And I strongly disagree on the funding—there is infinite capital for sufficiently strong businesses.
I haven't tried raising capital. But it seems to me that investors only care about businesses which strength equals potential unicorn. That level of profit often (if not always) clashes with integrity, regardless of the vision being sold.
I guess I would just like to see that call for the betterment of business and society to fall towards the investors too.
The bet, and sacrifice, always falls on the founders. And the betterment of the world should come from collective effort.
However, founders can't control markets and they can't control investors interests. The only thing they can control is building a profitable business with a product that has inherent meaning. That's the beauty of it! Startups are permissionless innovation.
My central claim is that founders can take what we've learned over the last decade and do things different this time.
A beautiful meditation on our motivations for building. I think the call must be answered not by a change in individual motivations but in a broad shift in societal values. We value optimization above all else. We prize efficiency, a value responsible for many of the most important inventions of the 20th century. But to create an ecosystem that actually optimizes for empathy, we'll need to drop efficiency as our primary driver and look instead to adding the friction of human relationships into our systems.
I agree. There is cultural (as well as a capital) revolution that is required if we want to do it better this time. It is part of the reason why I struck out on my own!
I’m with you on the responsibility point. But here’s the tension: markets don’t reward morality, they reward attention. Founders who want to elevate have to design for both impact that feels as addictive as entertainment, or the “elevating” tech won’t scale.
The first thing that popped into my head is that "markets don't reward morality, but users do." I don't know how true that is or how to square that with our current environment, but that's my gut feeling.
We are living in the midst of a Renaissance, the opportunity to course correct will always be in front of us. The global community is ready for platforms and tech that resonates within us, affecting us in ways we didn't expect, making us think different, approach the world through new lenses, and dive into the incredible array of dimensions of what we have imagined.
In the case of the internet, we have wandered into aversion of the web that forces us to browse 'pockets' of the full experience. Resembling the AM waveform on Radio. Chatbots have created a sense of senseless, non-relatable traffic that just gets in the way of content that is truly moving, on the FM dial.
We were able to rethink how we approached entertainment and media via radio, and fortunately, still are. We have to reinvent the 'Purpose-of-Tech" wheel because, in my optimistic paradigm, Why not? The alternative is too boring and annoyingly dystopic.
Does this all really just come down in your mind to a "good founder" exercising their will and moral fiber and grit to execute a truly humanistic app/service to make the world better? I'm not saying it's not possible, but the prevailing system and incentives strongly, strongly favor inhumane values, so you need to work *against* that system to express well-being-oriented values.
Working against capitalism isn't what most tech founders have in mind and isn't going to lead to the kind of success most want/envision. We do have a few examples of people doing this and they're inspiring; I would love to see more founders following in the footsteps of Jimmy Wales, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, Sal Khan, and the like, or even Brewster Kahle (who founded and exited several companies and basically amassed wealth then used that position to found the Internet Archive), but it's a rarified path. Many of these people do not have large salaries, they're not huge in the public eye (Wales is known but not anywhere near as famous as Bezos, Altman, etc.), and perhaps most critically, most of what they've founded are *nonprofits*. While that business model obviously exists within capitalism, it operates in a way that is essentially counter to the core values and tenets of capitalism - it is an anomaly. Do you believe that a tech founder truly can create a for-profit company that deeply values and expresses human wellbeing and also becomes a significant financial success? If so what are some examples?
I'm all for the core message here, but once again it feels like it ignores or at least elides the forces that largely orient our founders and the companies they create toward configurations that are harmful to humanity. Individual agency and choice has a role, but is dramatically overemphasized in the telling here, in my view.
Oshyan—love your feedback! Your comments are always so thoughtful.
I would argue that the world is hungry for beauty, craft, and purpose, but it takes a superhuman level of skill and grit to wrench it into being. Educating users on the value while also building competitive product is very hard. It is so hard that the default path—the one sold by the startup industrial complex—doesn't really talk about it. My goal with The Leverage is to equip the technologists who read this publication the moral framework, knowledge, and purpose to put in that extra effort in care.
So yes, I believe it is possible to build large, profitable companies that exhibit craft, care, and beauty. You can care deeply about the world and about the product at once. As far as examples go maybe worthy of a full post? But consumer brands I think that exemplify this are MSCHF, Patagonia, Costco. I also think it is possible on the SaaS front for companies like Notion, Mercury, Linear, Framer, Not Boring Software (you'll note how many of those companies I've selected as sponsors!). Explicit social change doesn't have to be the purpose of every company.
Thanks, and I appreciate the examples. Yes, Patagonia is now a classic, likewise Costco. I wasn't that familiar with MSCHF, but they seem much smaller scale and earlier in their journey. Maybe they'll get there as shining examples of this sort of thing, but I feel like they need to make bigger impact first? I would love a full post on inspiring examples in this space for sure!
Yet one could argue that Patagonia is virtuous in name only. While their communication emphasizes selling durable and recycled goods, in reality, the company sells considerable amounts of recycled plastic. It might be better than other brands, yet buying and diffusing microplastics from their recycled bags and other items is still harmful. But the founder is cool and the campaigns are fresh.
I think this illustrates precisely my point: Patagonia *is* a stand-out example, and *compared to other companies* they are "good". But evaluated on the basis of negative impact on the world vs. positive impact on humanity it's not all that impressive, i.e. not that "good", objectively speaking. In other words if you think of the absolute biggest positive impact on humanity that a company could have and compare Patagonia to that it falls well short. But this IS just about the best that capitalism can offer on balance! And Patagonia is a significant outlier in that the pro-humanity choices they made are rare in the for-profit world and just happened to still result in good profits through a combination of factors, at least some of which appear to just be good fortune. There are plenty of other examples of companies that had an arguably bigger positive impact on the world, but they also tend to come with bigger negatives too. The evaluations, metrics, and incentives are wrong in this system, plain and simple.
That path you outlined is the only I see possible. "Beating the game" and amassing enough wealth to then be able to ignore the game altogether.
I certainly would be building something different if I didn't feel like I have to beat the game first. And I think that's the case for most founders who don't want to achieve unicorn-level wealth. They just want the financial freedom to build ventures that have a positive impact.
Yeah, that makes sense and is certainly more inspiring and supportable to me vs. the pursuit of unicorn status. It's a pragmatic decision and as long as you are able to maintain that vision and grounding even if you reach success, and thus ultimately you *do* exit and then go on to use your resources to do something more values-oriented, then it's great. It doesn't seem to happen often, unfortunately.
Personally I'm more interested in seeing if there is commonality and potentially effective alternative strategy behind the few examples of people who *didn't* take that route, Linus Torvalds being one of the few examples I can really think of. Jimmy Wales started in finance, Brewster Kahle founded and exited at least one major tech company prior, and both used their existing resources to make their respective humanity-projects a reality (Wikipedia, The Internet Archive). I'm grateful that both of them chose the path they ultimately did, but I'm hopeful that it is not a necessary starting point to make a pile of money before contributing meaningfully to humanity. Perhaps some examples of that narrow path might be Eugen Rochko (Mastodon), Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap), and Ton Roosendaal (Blender)...
There are founders out there trying to figure out how to make something that's not just about profit, but they aren't backed by funding. And if they have the privilege to try and take a go at it, the only realistic way they have to get their products out there is by playing into the games of algorithms that thrive on click-bait, fear-mongering, and polarizing takes. Most who are motivated to build something that actually matters lose all motivation when they face the reality of what they have to do to get noticed.
That is the challenge (and the opportunity). Founders have to take the lessons of the last twelve years and make something beautiful that is competitive with the slop. It requires toughness/craftiness on a whole different level. And I strongly disagree on the funding—there is infinite capital for sufficiently strong businesses.
I haven't tried raising capital. But it seems to me that investors only care about businesses which strength equals potential unicorn. That level of profit often (if not always) clashes with integrity, regardless of the vision being sold.
I guess I would just like to see that call for the betterment of business and society to fall towards the investors too.
The bet, and sacrifice, always falls on the founders. And the betterment of the world should come from collective effort.
I agree on collective action! And I agree investors have a part to play in funding companies that bring about actual innovation (see this essay I wrote in 2022 https://every.to/napkin-math/has-venture-lost-its-soul)
However, founders can't control markets and they can't control investors interests. The only thing they can control is building a profitable business with a product that has inherent meaning. That's the beauty of it! Startups are permissionless innovation.
My central claim is that founders can take what we've learned over the last decade and do things different this time.
A beautiful meditation on our motivations for building. I think the call must be answered not by a change in individual motivations but in a broad shift in societal values. We value optimization above all else. We prize efficiency, a value responsible for many of the most important inventions of the 20th century. But to create an ecosystem that actually optimizes for empathy, we'll need to drop efficiency as our primary driver and look instead to adding the friction of human relationships into our systems.
I agree. There is cultural (as well as a capital) revolution that is required if we want to do it better this time. It is part of the reason why I struck out on my own!
I’m with you on the responsibility point. But here’s the tension: markets don’t reward morality, they reward attention. Founders who want to elevate have to design for both impact that feels as addictive as entertainment, or the “elevating” tech won’t scale.
The first thing that popped into my head is that "markets don't reward morality, but users do." I don't know how true that is or how to square that with our current environment, but that's my gut feeling.
Your call-to-action is illuminating.
We are living in the midst of a Renaissance, the opportunity to course correct will always be in front of us. The global community is ready for platforms and tech that resonates within us, affecting us in ways we didn't expect, making us think different, approach the world through new lenses, and dive into the incredible array of dimensions of what we have imagined.
In the case of the internet, we have wandered into aversion of the web that forces us to browse 'pockets' of the full experience. Resembling the AM waveform on Radio. Chatbots have created a sense of senseless, non-relatable traffic that just gets in the way of content that is truly moving, on the FM dial.
We were able to rethink how we approached entertainment and media via radio, and fortunately, still are. We have to reinvent the 'Purpose-of-Tech" wheel because, in my optimistic paradigm, Why not? The alternative is too boring and annoyingly dystopic.