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Working with Purpose, Forever

hakaimagazine.com

31–40 of 74 posts

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#31

[flagged]

Sure, though no reason a Corporation could not also have a duty to all stakeholders. Back when Corporations were a new thing, you had to prove they would be a benefit to the crown to form them. That's not to say it's necessarily ideal in all cases.

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#32

> A Perpetual Purpose Trust (PPT) is a legal and organizational structure that allows a company to operate with a focus on achieving their overarching goal of creating purpose or impact rather than focusing on maximizing profits alone. Patagonia and Bosch are the well known examples of this ownership structure.

How about OpenAI?

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#33
post #15

This sounds like just a fancy version of a co-op, which has been a thing for a very long time.

Those two organizational models are fundamentally different. The PPT is a top-down approach which sets firm company values with little room for deviation, ensuring consistency but limiting individual input (admittedly mostly executive/company officer input).

In contrast, the co-op is a bottoms-up model which empowers every employee to have a say, making the company dynamic and responsive to collective decisions.

While both might aim beyond just profits and share goals like amplifying employee voices, their execution is markedly different. For example, in an employee cooperative, major changes can happen quickly through collective decision-making. Conversely, in the PPT model, even unanimous agreement on change could be denied.

As a thought experiment, imagine what would happen in both scenarios (co-op vs PPT) if every single employee (including executives/company officers) decided they didn’t want the business to buy local fish anymore.

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#34

Call me crazy, but the idea that a company can be formed with no purpose other than to make a profit strikes me as somewhat perverse and malign. All companies should exist for a specific purpose, and when that is achieved (or no longer needed, or no longer possible), they should be wound up.

You can form companies with all kinds of specific purposes, however, if you want to attract investors (or even attract general public investment by being a publicly traded ompany), then don't be surprised if most investors want to invest in companies whose explicit purpose is making money for the investors.

Yes the system is broken

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#35

Call me crazy, but the idea that a company can be formed with no purpose other than to make a profit strikes me as somewhat perverse and malign. All companies should exist for a specific purpose, and when that is achieved (or no longer needed, or no longer possible), they should be wound up.

You can form companies with all kinds of specific purposes, however, if you want to attract investors (or even attract general public investment by being a publicly traded ompany), then don't be surprised if most investors want to invest in companies whose explicit purpose is making money for the investors.

If you actually want to dedicate your company to a purpose, it should be something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can form companies with all kinds of specific purposes, however, if you want to attract investors (or even attract general public investment by being a publicly traded ompany), then don't be surprised if most investors want to invest in companies whose explicit purpose is making money for the investors.

If you actually want to dedicate your company to a purpose, it should be something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation

Not to burst your bubble, but B corp certs (I know it's slightly different than SPC, but similar concept and related in your wiki.) isn't exclusive nor hard to get. [0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240202-has-b-corp-cer...

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#37
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making profit is always a goal you achieve while doing something else: selling local seafood, writing software, designing chips, mining ores, whatever. So making profits and doing something else cannot be harder than just making profits. Also, companies receive and pay back loans all the time, it's quite a common procedure. Why should it be any different here?

> Making profit is always a goal you achieve while doing something else: selling local seafood It's selling expensive local seafood when your competition selling cheaper imported frozen stuff. > Also, companies receive and pay back loans all the time, it's quite a common procedure. Why should it be any different here? If there was no difference, then there would be no need in inventing alternative capital formation l…

It sounds like you don't understand how business loans work. This is not a VC play.

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#38

Call me crazy, but the idea that a company can be formed with no purpose other than to make a profit strikes me as somewhat perverse and malign. All companies should exist for a specific purpose, and when that is achieved (or no longer needed, or no longer possible), they should be wound up.

But if you're pivoting it seems like a waste to wind up the company and restart it with the same people and resources. A company is just a legal name with legal powers attached to it. Why add purpose to that?

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#39

Call me crazy, but the idea that a company can be formed with no purpose other than to make a profit strikes me as somewhat perverse and malign. All companies should exist for a specific purpose, and when that is achieved (or no longer needed, or no longer possible), they should be wound up.

If companies and persons are legally equivalent, I'm not sure why this is so perverse to you. There are many people in the world who do not have "purpose", their personal philosophy is that they need/want to go out and "make a profit" so that they can survive. Are they perverse?

A company isn't perfectly equivalent to a person, but does exist as a tool so people can accomplish goals. If two people have no calling, have no passions, and they start a company that expresses their personal goals of survival, what's wrong with that?

Re: Working with Purpose, Forever

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can form companies with all kinds of specific purposes, however, if you want to attract investors (or even attract general public investment by being a publicly traded ompany), then don't be surprised if most investors want to invest in companies whose explicit purpose is making money for the investors.

Yes the system is broken

What is the broken part? There is a difference between investment and donation, should investors be forced to invest in ventures which don't explicitly promise them financial return on the investment?
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