The Build

The Room Is Filling

For seven years, building a company where the profit serves the mission drew genuine enthusiasm and no capital. That changed this year, and the pattern matters more than any single conversation in it.

For about seven years I pitched a structure nobody wanted to fund. A consumer packaged goods company built so that the business exists to serve the charity, with my own misaligned incentives removed permanently and on purpose, before any outside capital came in. Every room I walked into gave me the same response, and I could set a watch by it. Genuine interest. Real enthusiasm, even. An offer to advise. No check. The most common sentence I heard in those years was some version of this is wonderful and I can't invest in it, and the second most common was silence.

I want to be precise about what I am claiming here, because founders overclaim constantly and it is how the whole category loses credibility. I have not closed a round. I have not exited anything. The company is mid-build and most days it is hard. What I am claiming is much narrower and, I would argue, more interesting than a funding announcement.

The inbound changed. Not gradually. This year.

• A woman who runs one of the larger mother networking organizations in the country reached out.
• A corporate attorney at one of the largest advertising companies in the world reached out.
• A twenty-year veteran of Condé Nast asked me, directly, whether I was ready for what is about to happen.
• Speaking invitations started arriving instead of being chased.
• An Emmy-winning broadcaster asked to serve as our spokesperson on a volunteer basis.

None of these people know each other. They come from different industries, different networks, different generations of professional experience. Not one of them was warmed up by a mutual connection or a fund partner making an introduction. They each arrived at the same conclusion independently and then went looking for someone building it.

That is a materially different kind of signal than a term sheet. A close is a single event, and a single event can be luck, timing, or one person's unusual conviction. A steady stream of unconnected strangers converging on the same thesis from five different directions is evidence about the market rather than evidence about me. The idea has left my head and started existing on its own.

The clearest confirmation is not even in my inbox. Eric Ries published Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great, and it went straight onto the New York Times bestseller list. His argument is that mission drift is a design problem rather than a bad-actor problem, and that ownership and governance are where you solve it, illustrated through Cadbury, the John Lewis Partnership, Vanguard and Anthropic. He came to that from the inside, watching well-intentioned companies rot under structural pressure. I came to it from the outside, trying to break into an industry and refusing to enter on its terms. Same conclusion, opposite doors. When two people arrive at an identical structural insight from completely different vantage points, that is usually the tell that the insight is about the system rather than about either person.

So here is the part I actually want on the record. I am not interested in being right about this in a way that scores points against the people who passed. That is a small ambition and it ages badly. What I want is more useful than vindication. I have a lead of a few years on a problem that a lot of people are about to run into simultaneously, and the highest-value thing I can do with that lead is spend it. Make the expensive mistakes first. Document the governance structures that hold and the ones that quietly do not. Find out which funders can actually underwrite a locked covenant and which ones only say they can. Publish the failures with the same detail as the wins, so that the next founder who wants to build this way starts three years ahead of where I started instead of three years behind.

The window where this looks eccentric is closing fast, and I would rather be useful in it than smug about it.