Power
How wide is this territory? Would all good nonprofits be good companies? Possibly not. What makes Google so valuable is that their users have money. If you make people with money love you, you can probably get some of it. But could you also base a successful startup on behaving like a nonprofit to people who don't have money? Could you, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?
I'm not sure, but I suspect that if you pushed this idea, you'd be surprised how far it would go. For example, people who apply to Y Combinator don't generally have much money, and yet we can profit by helping them, because with our help they could make money. Maybe the situation is similar with malaria. Maybe an organization that helped lift its weight off a country could benefit from the resulting growth.
I'm not proposing this is a serious idea. I don't know anything about malaria. But I've been kicking ideas around long enough to know when I come across a powerful one.
One way to guess how far an idea extends is to ask yourself at what point you'd bet against it. The thought of betting against benevolence is alarming in the same way as saying that something is technically impossible. You're just asking to be made a fool of, because these are such powerful forces.
For example, initially I thought maybe this principle only applied to Internet startups. Obviously it worked for Google, but what about Microsoft? Surely Microsoft isn't benevolent? But when I think back to the beginning, they were. Compared to IBM they were like Robin Hood. When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to make money selling hardware at high prices. But by gaining control of the PC standard, Microsoft opened up the market to any manufacturer. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people got to have computers who couldn't otherwise have afforded them. It's the sort of thing you'd expect Google to do.
Microsoft isn't so benevolent now. Now when one thinks of what Microsoft does to users, all the verbs that come to mind begin with F.And yet it doesn't seem to pay. Their stock price has been flat for years. Back when they were Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google's. Could there be a connection?
You can see how there would be. When you're small, you can't bully customers, so you have to charm them. Whereas when you're big you can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it's easier than satisfying them. You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.
You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape. So "Don't be evil" may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I'm sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM.
The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other company. Anyone can adopt "Don't be evil." The catch is that people will hold you to it. So I don't think you're going to see record labels or tobacco companies using this discovery. .....[read more]
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