Building Inspiring Companies
Today I’m thrilled to be part of the team launching Obvious Ventures, a new fund focused on category-leading startups across sustainability, healthy living, and people power. As an investor, I spend a lot of time and energy thinking about the core building blocks of the kinds of inspiring companies that lead and win over the long term. For me, the essential ingredient is the quality of leadership.
My point of view has been formed by my ten years of work at Patagonia. I was fortunate to be part of a team that worked and played well together, united around a core set of values. In his book Generosity Network, Jeffrey Walker eloquently describes the process of building inspiring music: “It’s not enough to be skilled at playing your own instrument. You need to learn to listen to everybody else’s sound, develop the flexibility to let your rhythms and harmonies mesh with theirs, and give others the freedom to improvise. Little by little, you find yourselves producing, as a group, musical creations that soar above the capabilities of any single performer.”
At Patagonia, I experienced this type of coordination. We weaved authentic leadership, purpose and a connection with our consumer together as the foundation for an inspiring company. With that foundation we were able to build innovative products, culture alignment, profitable growth and a company that was part of a social and environmental system rather than above it.
The interplay of these various blocks produced what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls “Flow” —where the culture and people of the organization are fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of activity. This all led to sustained performance.
My experience suggests that it takes a certain kind of people to build and scale these kinds of organizations. Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, calls it “authentic leadership” that “emphasizes building the leader’s legitimacy through honest relationships with followers which value their input and are built on an ethical foundation.” At the Aspen Institute, where I am a Crown Fellow, we call it “enlightened leadership” in which individuals are encouraged to reflect on the ideals and ideas that define a good organization, and to discuss and take action on critical issues that we face as global citizens.
At Patagonia we debated, discussed and acted on multiple topics and issues related to our purpose. One of my favorite examples was the packaging design for Capilene Underwear. We took a contrarian approach and dramatically reduced the size and weight of the packaging — what we called a ‘sushi roll’. We traded off marketing surface area in exchange for a product that fundamentally aligned with our sustainability vision. The results were phenomenal: we saved money on packaging, reduced our environmental footprint, and improved profit margins for us and our retail partners.
Numerous examples of combined profit and purpose exist in the history of the company. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia has often said, “every time I made a decision because it was the right thing to do, I’ve ended up making more money”.
My search for inspired leaders like Yvon continued as I moved from operator to investor. My work with Steve Case at Revolution LLC, and running an early stage fund in India, has reinforced my lens for companies with authentic and enlightened leadership.
I’ve made the decision to join my teammates Evan Williams , James Joaquin, and Sami Inkinen in the creation of Obvious Ventures because I think there’s no better time to create a purpose-driven fund, building a family of world positive companies. Our inspiration is the belief that entrepreneurs will create profitable, long-term value by solving big global challenges.
