Build a Great Company by Building a Company for Good
Building a company that achieves financial success begins with more than a desire to make money. It begins with a burning desire to make something good.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple the company was days away from bankruptcy. Michael Dell was on record as saying the Apple should just shut down and return the cash to shareholders. When challenged on this, Jobs said, ““If you want to make Apple great again, let’s get going. If not, get the hell out.”
Jobs was not interested in making money. He already had more money than he needed. In his final role as Apple’s CEO, Jobs took an annual salary of $1. Jobs was interested in art and beauty. (He originally met Steve Wozniak because they were both fans of Bob Dylan.) Technology and computers were his medium but they were not ends in and of themselves. Their role was to help transform us and enrich our lives. Apple was Job’s vehicle for doing good. He didn’t give money to charity. Apple was his gift to the world. And in pursuing his dreams he built the biggest company in the world.
This is the kind of mindset you need to be successful as an entrepreneur. With Ayoudo, the company I now run we see competitors pop up every day. In the winner-take-all environment of the Internet you need to be the best in the world. And the only way you get there is by working hard and genuinely believing that you are building something beyond a profitable business.
The customer experience that you are designing and building needs to be refined, simple, humane and better than all the rest. A successful company builds something that connects with people at an almost spiritual level. Google promised to ‘do no evil’ because customers want their products to represent the values that they hold. Apple is the same. Apple products don’t expect you to figure them out. They come to you. Your children can use them. They interface with our most basic impulses and reflect our priorities in the layout of their screens.
But the design of beauty goes beyond interaction. Great companies also aspire to do something good - from the beginning. In accounting this is called Good Will. In religion it is called Karma. But in practice it is the thing that gets you up in the morning and forces you to work harder than your competitors to build something better. It’s what keeps your team jamming throughout the night and gets them beyond the tense moments of tight deadlines and unexpected challenges. In a startup it just takes one person to say screw it’ for the whole enterprise to crater.
At Ayoudo we know the importance of this key corporate ingredient. Our app lets people buy and sell services. I can get someone to cut my grass or redesign my website. In turn, I can fix their car stereo or walk their dog. But we know that real communities are more than commerce. We are mapping our app to all human needs. We know that the world has a big to do list and we know people want to help their neighbor. That’s why we also let people ask for and offer to be volunteers. People in our network can offer to shovel your grandmother’s driveway or clean up a beach. Ayoudoan can help clean up after a flood or give someone a ride during the transit strike. We do all this for free because we believe that if we pay it forward, if we let people use the platform to strengthen the bonds of their community that they will then come to us for the commercial stuff.
Today the Apple that Steve Jobs built and then re-built is one of the biggest in the world. The company’s products are beloved and when Jobs passed away at the young age of 51 he was mourned by his customers who showered his stores with tributes and flowers. The homepage of Google went black and paid homage to one of the greatest entrepreneurs since Thomas Edison.
Time will tell if we follow in the footsteps of Steve Jobs or if we’ll live through a glorious failure and become another footnote. But either way we’re committed to building the next great Canadian network and we have faith that Canadians believe there’s more to life than money.
Michael Tippett is the CEO and co-founder of Ayoudo. Tippett is also a 20-year veteran of the startup world. He is a 2-time Emmy Nominee, the former Executive Director of GrowLab and Co-Founder of NowPublic.com.