Mission & purpose

ut the way you don't give up is completely different. Instead of merely resisting change, you're driven toward a goal by energy and resilience, through paths discovered by imagination and optimized by judgement.

A brand is not a logo. A brand is a promise, a story and a shorthand. A brand tells us what to expect the next time we engage with you.

Being named Fred is not a brand. Fred is your name, not your promise. If you’re an unreliable, selfish hustler, that’s your brand.

The work that lasts from this era will be no different. The companies that endure, the technologies that serve rather than consume, the institutions that hold their shape across generations when the founders are dead and the capital is restless and the market is telling them to be something other than what they are — they will have something at... See more

Merely having energy and imagination is quite rare. But to solve hard problems you need three more qualities: resilience, good judgement, and a focus on some kind of goal.

Ever since the Second World War ended, we have spent decades holding everything with a loose grip. Loose-grip conviction is comfortable and it allows us to participate in every conversation, to be perfectly hedged in every order of life. It allows you to keep one foot in the market and one foot in the critique of the market and never commit to... See more

Resilience means not having one's morale destroyed by setbacks. Setbacks are inevitable once problems reach a certain size, so if you can't bounce back from them, you can only do good work on a small scale. But resilience is not the same as obstinacy. Resilience means setbacks can't change your morale, not that they can't change your mind.

Tom Wolfe's 1984 essay, "The Worship of Art", explains what happened next. Sometime in the 20th century, when businessmen lost these moral frameworks, they replaced them with art and cultural philanthropy, which became a substitute faith. The museum board was the congregation, the gala was the liturgy, and the naming rights to the hospital were a... See more

"The church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables."