Capitalism took a wrong turn fifty years ago, asserting that a company's sole purpose is to create shareholder value. Since then, it's shaped the way we build companies, along with the systems and policies that govern them.
Today an overwhelming number of people agree that capitalism needs to be refactored. Shareholder value is too narrow and short-term to be an optimal measure of success. This talk is about tangible steps you can take to embrace a broader definition of success in your company and to create a business that's built to last.
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Okay, gang. We're back for our third keynote of the day. And we're gonna be hearing from Nick Francis from HelpScout, who has a pretty fascinating perspective and point of view on the subject of capitalism, the subject of company building. And he's going to be talking about architecting a company for profit and purpose.
There's tonnes of great stuff in here. I'm looking forward to the conversation afterwards. There's elements of it that we'll dig into that, I think is will really be of value to to a lot of us in the TuringFest audience. So right now, let's, hear from Nick on, and then we'll dig into the chat afterwards.
Hey, everyone. My name is Nick Francis. I am the co founder and CEO of a company called HelpScout. It's a real pleasure to be with you today and to be talking about one of my very favorite topics, which is architecting a company for profit and purpose.
So just want to show a big thanks to the Touring Fest folks, Brian and Erin and the whole team for putting on a wonderful event in a difficult and unprecedented time. And so really happy to be here speaking with you today. So let's go ahead and dive in.
I became passionate about this topic while building a company called HelpScout, and I've been building that company for about ten years now. And what I'm sharing with you today is really the most important learning that I've had along the way. And before we get into some of those details, I thought it might be helpful to just tell you a little bit about HelpScout.
As for the product we make, we make customer service a competitive advantage for eleven thousand companies all over the world. We strongly believe that the future is customer centric, and we make software that puts a great customer experience at the very center of every interaction.
In a world of frustrating chatbots and ticket numbers, complex portals, and robo emails, we actually went a different way and designed tools that are meant to deliver a personal touch at scale. So many of our customers like Trello and Basecamp, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Zapier all choose HelpScout because it mirrors their customer centric values, and it enables them to serve their customers the right way.
One key decision we made from day one was to be a remote first company. And for me, the calculus is quite simple. It may seem intuitive these days in post pandemic, but, I believe talent is more valuable than geography. And so we designed a culture that optimizes for that pretty much from day one, and we now have more than a hundred ten people in eighty plus cities.
And especially in light of the pandemic, we're excited about the future of work and remote work in particular, and we're aiming to build one of the world's best remote first cultures. Finally, we became a certified B corporation in twenty nineteen. So we'll get into this later in the talk.
But being a certified B corp basically means that we are held to the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability in order to balance profit and purpose. So today, we need to have a conversation about capitalism because the truth is it's badly in need of a refactor.
And don't get me wrong. As an entrepreneur, I love capitalism, and that's one of the reasons why I give this talk. Because it's quite clear to me that capitalism isn't operating properly in its current state. It's very similar to building software. Over time, you learn a lot about how your code performs in the real world, and sometimes you have to change how the system is architected to ensure better performance.
And we should look no further than the customers of capitalism, us, the consumer, for evidence that it's not working today. Only nineteen percent of Americans between the ages of nineteen and twenty nine call themselves capitalists, And less than half actually said they supported capitalism.
This is from a two thousand fourteen survey done by the Harvard Institute of Politics. My fear is that these numbers have probably gotten worse, between two thousand fourteen and now. The average employee's pay adjusted for inflation has been nearly flat since nineteen seventy three, so forty seven years.
The average CEO, meanwhile, makes two hundred seventy one times more than the average worker. And the same sort of disparity exists if you look at multigenerational net worth among white people in America relative to black and Latinx populations. The flaws of capitalism are propagating and compounding an unsustainable wealth gap, in our country and around the world.
As that gap grows, fewer and fewer people are able to participate in economic growth and to prosper. In other words, when capitalism no longer serves consumers, when the middle class is no longer able to prosper, its days are numbered. And if you start looking into how we got here, as I did, it's clear that capitalism took a wrong turn fifty years ago in nineteen seventy.
Ever since then, the systems that govern capitalism have slowly been polluted and exploited by a relatively small number of bad actors. And it all started with an op ed in The New York Times by a renowned economist named Milton Friedman. In it, Friedman declared, there is one and only one social responsibility of business, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase profits.
So according to Milton Friedman, for a business to participate in any activity that's not explicitly designed for profit maximization would be irresponsible. And furthermore, any and all efforts to maximize profits within the law would be fully justified. And yet for fifty years, the gears of capitalism have gradually turned towards this idea of shareholder primacy.
So shareholder primacy is the idea that Friedman had. It's a single focus on shareholder value above and beyond all else. Not customers, not the environment, not society at large, and only shareholders. And that's where capitalism started to lose its way, when it stopped being about customers.
But I do have good news today. Today, most people agree that Friedman was wrong. That capitalism built upon this idea of shareholder primacy is deeply flawed. You know, just this year, we saw Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, become quite vocal along these lines.
He said, Freeman Friedman influenced, I'd say brainwashed, which I love that word, a generation of CEOs who believed that the only business of business is business. Furthermore, last year, the Business Roundtable, which had previously endorsed Friedman's ideas, changed their statement on the purpose of a corporation.
So for those of you that are not familiar with the business roundtable, this is basically a group of the world's most influential CEOs and companies. And so this was a big deal. They ended up saying companies should serve not only their shareholders, but also deliver value to their customers, invest in employees, deal fairly with suppliers, and support the communities in which they operate.
But when I look at this, it really sums up where we're at fifty years after Friedman's original paper. Capitalism has officially reached the brink because this is what we're talking about now. The most powerful institutions have to come out and say that businesses should serve their customers, that they should be good to their employees, that they should support their community?
I mean, are you kidding me? Like, what did they think their job was? When did we forget that this was the whole point of building a business? But that's where we're at right now. We're at the ground floor, and we're forced to reckon with some of the challenges that have that have brought that that have come along over the last fifty years.
It's no wonder eighty percent of young people don't consider themselves capitalists. According to this model, I wouldn't consider myself one either. Shareholder value is nothing more than a byproduct of building a good company, but we've fetishized it into something completely different. And here's the kicker.
Guess who owns fifty percent of the stocks in the US? The wealthiest one percent. The rich are the ones that benefit the most from creating shareholder value. And and I think I would posit that Friedman knew exactly what he was doing. He said capitalism was all about shareholder value because it would disproportionately benefit himself and his friends.
But I just love this quote from Yancey Strickler. A world of scarcity can become a world of abundance if we accept a broader definition of value. Yancey is the co founder and former CEO of Kickstarter. I love his book, This Could Be Our Future. It's a great book.
If you wanna read more on this topic, it's a really great place to start, and it brings a lot of these ideas home. But as entrepreneurs, we have to remind ourselves that building long term value in a business is way more, than shareholder value.
It's a way broader definition of value. Charlie Munger, as usual, said it very well as well. He said, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Refactoring capitalism starts with changing the incentives. If the incentives represent a broader definition of value, as Yancey says, then the outcomes will follow.
And so what I really wanna talk more about is how we change those incentives. Tactically, that means moving away from the ideas of shareholder primacy and towards an idea called stakeholder governance. So what's stakeholder governance? I would describe it as what you probably know of as common sense.
Many of you leverage a stakeholder governance model in your company today. That just may not be the words you use to describe it. But it basically means that the decisions made in your business are made in the interest of several key stakeholders. Shareholders are absolutely a stakeholder in your business, but who's to say their interest should be prioritized over the interest of your customers, your employees, your community, and the environment.
All stakeholders deserve a seat at the table. And most people agree today that this is this is this way of building and running a business is far better. But the problem is that we've had the last fifty years of systems being built around the old way, the shareholder primacy way of thinking.
And we need to reconstruct some of these systems and some of the incentives so that companies are built a different way. And it's really reflected in how the public markets work, what we're teaching in business school, and it's most definitely a staple of venture capital.
So even when we acknowledge there's a problem, we still have to spend decades refactoring and evolving all the systems that support capitalism in order to truly resolve this challenge. And the good news I have for you today is that many people are doing just that, and there's reason to be optimistic.
Enter the public benefit corporation. So public benefit corporations are a legal framework for adopting stakeholder governance principles. So a PBC is much like a C corp, at least the way we would describe it here in the US. It's a for profit company, but the bylaws outline a stakeholder governance model instead of one that's all about creating shareholder value.
So a c corp is to shareholder primacy as a public benefit corporation is to stakeholder governance. This is what I would refer to as the next generation of capitalism and at least the legal framework that that should be used to to describe them.
Currently, there's thirty eight states in America that support a public benefit corporation, including Delaware, which is where most companies are incorporated. And there's another four states working on it as we speak. There's similar frameworks internationally as well. So, I know that, there's at least Italy, has adopted a similar framework, but several are under consideration across Europe, Canada, and Australia.
And if your business only has a couple of shareholders, it really may not be that important. You can operate a company or an entity that embraces stakeholder centric values, but the legal framework still may may not necessarily reinforce them. For a company like HelpScout, it's a little bit different.
We have investors. We have shareholders. We give stock to all of our employees. And so with a broader shareholder base, we wanna make sure that there's a legal framework in place that holds shareholders, all shareholders, accountable to considering all stakeholders. And that's where the b corp certification comes in.
So this certification is above and beyond being a legal public benefit corporation. It's equivalent to the way you would think of an organic or fair trade certification in the food business, except the B Corp certification applies to business practices. So these are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to profit to balance profit and purpose.
At HelpScout, we got this certification because it really tied our words to our actions and holds us accountable. For those that are interested, it did take us about a year to go through the full process, but I have no regrets. We're really proud to be a certified B corporation today.
There's also other entities that are committed to changing this system and sort of building it from the from the ground up. One of them is the long term stock exchange. So the LTSC supports companies that are built to last and investors who measure their horizons in decades and value companies accordingly.
The LTSC is approved by the SEC. It's an operating public market today, in in America, And it was founded by a guy named Eric Reiss. You've probably heard Eric's name because he created the Lean Startup movement several years ago. Similar to the b corp certification, the LTSC aligns the incentives and the rules with a long term stakeholder centric approach, and they do this in a variety of very creative ways.
They remove a lot of the practices that exist in public markets today and free up public companies to to build their business in a different way. So this is exciting stuff. We're seeing the gears of capitalism really start to turn again. And I think we're in the early stages of an incredibly big shift.
And if you don't hear anything from me today, I I just want you to hear this one thing. You can help accelerate adoption towards a capitalism that serves everyone. It's up to entrepreneurs and founders and people that are building companies today to embrace these ideas.
And then the legislation and the regulations will follow. We have to write the playbook. Nothing is more impactful than building companies that operate this way. And that can help accelerate adoption. As a result of COVID, we saw remote work accelerate by five, ten, fifteen years.
We saw industries like e commerce accelerate adoption by at least five years. And my point is that we don't need a pandemic to accelerate the adoption of these new systems. We just need more companies that are being built this way. It doesn't have to take fifty years either.
It could take twenty if the next generation of companies are built on more stakeholder centric principles. So at HelpScout, the the mark we wanna leave on the world above and beyond the products we make is the playbook. We're trying to be a case study for doing these things the right way, frankly, because we were inspired by the previous generation of founders and companies that were built, how we would define the right way.
We were one of the first remote, remote first cultures, and we were among the earliest certified b corporations in the software business. My hope is that the work that we're doing helps to make things just a little easier for the next generation of companies to come along and keep adding pages to that playbook.
I bet you didn't expect me to end the talk with a quote from Jeff Bezos, but here we are. He makes a brilliant point here, and I just wanna make sure that you hear it. He says that I'm always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost.
Is that person a missionary or a mercenary? The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or service and love their customers and are trying to build a great service. And here's the most important part of the quote. The great paradox here is that it's usually the missionaries who make more money.
The Milton Friedmans of the world want you to think that this is how it works, that building a great company and making the world a better place are mutually exclusive. But I think that's ********. The reality is the opposite. All we have to do is look at the last fifty years of capitalism as a case study, that this is not how it works.
Great businesses are forged by making it about both. When you build a great company and you make the world a better place, then and only then are you able to realize your business's full potential. You'll note that I didn't go deep on tactics today, and that's very much by design.
This is a talk purely about changing our incentives for building businesses. When every decision in our business is made in the long term interest of all stakeholders, the tactics are the easy part. Right? We all know how to do the right thing when we're able to consider all of our stakeholders.
Aligning the incentives is how we're going to fix capitalism and prepare it for the next hundred years. So thank you very much. I appreciate your time. It's been a pleasure to talk with you today, and I hope you got something. See you soon.
So we're we're just, trying to pick up with Nick. He's laughing his ass off somewhere in in, Colorado, but, I I can hear him there. So I think we're back. Nick, are you there? Hello. Yes. I am with you. And I don't think that was I'm just glad it wasn't my fault.
No. No. No. Nothing to do with you or me. Would just like to point out. Yeah. You know, this is this is why we record the talks. But even still, things can you know, **** goes wrong. But we're back. So so we we we lost you at the end, but then we brought you back.
So I think everybody will have got the whole the whole talk. Lots to get into. The idea that capitalism is not operating properly is is a pretty fundamental one and something that we're seeing. I mean, I think all the evidence is playing out all over the world again and again at the moment, and the big thing being the propagating an unsustainable wealth gap that you mentioned.
It's kind of fascinating as well, I think, how Milton Friedman, was this sort of, you know, the superhero of a particular era, is, certainly been viewed in a diff different light now. From your perspective, when you when you started out HelpScout, were you still drinking the Milton Friedman Kool Aid at that point?
Or had you already decided that you wanted to go down a different route was, I guess, the path that you're on now? Is this the path that you've been on since the beginning with the company? The short answer is yes. And and, you know, one of the points that I make in the talk that's so important is that for most entrepreneurs and for most people that start companies, this is common sense.
Thinking about your customers, being a benefit to your local community, thinking about your employees and building an inclusive environment for them, these are all common sense principles that just got lost along the way. So not old enough to so I started Help Scout in twenty eleven.
So I think this transition was well underway by then. The ideas of Milton Friedman had been sort of playing out over several decades up to that point. And yeah, the entrepreneurs I've always looked up to had this sort of common sense around what building companies is all about.
It's about customers and it's about all these really positive ways that you can have an impact on society. And I also mentioned it's a relatively small number of bad actors that just started to say, nope, these are the rules. And we're going to change the rules and the underlying system that enforces these rules to just change the brand of capitalism.
And I think a lot of people don't like the way that it's gone. And that's why I'm optimistic that we're now seeing all the data. And we're all seeing that, hey, these ideas were terrible. Let's find a way to rebuild the system. Yeah.
It it seems like, in the world of tech, it it almost feels like we have a bit of a schism. On the one hand, have unicorns and and decacorns or whatever the next type of corns are that that we have you know, the the tech crunches of the world are right up do the write ups about, and VCs are are sort of pushing that model.
But the there's definitely been a a move in the last few years where people have been choosing different paths, and we've got, you know, zebras versus unicorns, all that kind of stuff. But you've had a you've had a pretty interesting path in that sense because you have taken investment rounds a few different times, I think.
When you when you so you took angel you took if I'm not mistaken, you took angel money, and then you took VC later on. By the time you were doing those different rounds, how much of this conversation was happening? How much of the you know, when you were taking VC, it was the Foundry Group, Brad Feld, one of the most respected people in in that industry, and maybe one with a bit more of an open mind, and different outlook to many.
But did you sit down with Brad or or whoever at the Foundry and say, look, you know, this is what we want to do. We're building something purpose driven. Here here are the numbers. Here's where everybody makes money. But here's the the route we're taking.
What was that conversation like? Yeah. Maybe we should invent a new corn, Brian. Let's call it the candy corns. Wanna build a candy corn. I like it. And the truth is, and this kinda comes through in the end of the talk, is, you know, building a great company and and making the world a better place, these are not mutually exclusive ideas.
I think a business only reaches its its full potential when you do both. And there are, you know, investors that we've partnered with over our time that fully understand and appreciate that idea. So Foundry Group, you mentioned Brad and the team over there.
We partnered with a VC fund that's quite rare because they are also a certified b corporation. They were actually certified before we were. And so to a large extent, I think the people around the table already understood why this is just a more effective way to build a business.
By no means does it detract from our potential to build a great company, right, and and to be a market leader in the SMB segment. None of those ideals or none of those ambitions are off the table by way of saying, hey. We don't just care about you as a shareholder.
We equally care about our employees and our customers and our environment, and we will not compromise those for sole shareholder value. And so I think for most people, especially at this stage of capitalism, I think that's a pretty easy discussion to have. I go back to Yancey's quote.
This is all about broadening our definition of value. Value is not just revenue, which is where we get all the corns. It's all about, oh, this is a company's valuation or this is their revenue. That's a very small piece of the puzzle when it comes to building a long term successful business that resonates with a certain segment of the market.
So all I'm asking is for us to see the revenue pieces, see the dollars and cents, but also acknowledge the fact that there's a much broader view, that determines a company's value in a market and a and a company's value to employees and a company's value to society.
Yeah. It's a it's a point, I think, that gets overlooked a lot in these kind of discussions about the shift in capitalism and where we might go. And, you know, America's pretty terrified of the word socialism and, all of the connotations that go with that.
America's labels, political labels of left and right, etcetera, don't make a lot of sense to a lot of people in Europe. But but I there's a a book that I was reading recently called the Silk Roads by Peter Frankenpan, and it's it's the history of the world.
And it starts off with the the the Silk Road between Europe and Asia. And you're going back, like, five thousand BC, And it's all about trade. It's all about companies. It's all about business. And and this idea that business has to that we've sort of ended up in this Friedman sort of world where business only benefits the people that are the the shareholders.
That's not that's completely at odds with human history. So I think your, your your quest to help shape the next generation of companies, like you said to me earlier, you know, it's it's it's it ties in with history. But is the Go on.
Sorry to interrupt you, but these labels are so interesting to me too. And just for the record, anyone that's in Europe, they're confusing to Americans as well, that our society thinks in such binary ways about certain ideals. Because capitalism and socialism are just a broad set of ideals, and they can coexist in the same society.
We have socialist ideals in our country. We have a system called social security that offers people of retirement age income. That is a socialist ideal, and that can coexist with a very capitalist centric society and business climate. So just to be clear, we're all very confused about why the pundits like to make this such a black and white thing when it's just not These these ideals kinda coexist in in a in the same society and throughout the world, really.
Example of socialism in in the US is the NFL. Draft system that you guys have. The draft system's amazing. So genuinely Yeah. You know, European sports, there's nothing like that anywhere. I so I was listening to Chris Savage's podcast a couple of months ago talking too loud, and he was interviewing you.
And you guys dove into a lot of the stuff that you talked about in your presentation today. And the b corp thing, the the journey that you've been on there, the what it means to be a B Corp, etc. I mean, that that really struck me as being something really interesting.
And that would resonate with the Turing Fest audience. And that's, that's when when you and I started speaking. You mentioned it took you about a year to get certified. How long did it take though from first thinking about it and exploring it to going with your with your, your colleagues to deciding Yeah, this is the thing we want to do.
Well, there's this really interesting term that's become quite prominent. Maybe you've heard of it. It's called greenwashing. It's the whole idea of corporations coming out and making really bland or empty statements about their commitment to the environment or their commitment to society. And the folks at B Lab, which is the organization that runs the B Corp certification, said, you know what?
We need to address this. There need act there need to be real standards. And there need to be real there has to be real accountability and real teeth to this. Similar to, like I said, an organic or fair trade certification, people need to say, hey, I'm on board, and I'm actually accountable to certain standards.
Or I'm just waxing poetic and it doesn't really mean anything. And so I really appreciated that sentiment. You see a lot of companies talk about doing good in the world, but their actions don't back it up. If there was a way that we could verify that a company's actions actually match what they're saying publicly, that would be something to me.
I like to buy organic for all the same reasons that many people in the audience probably like to buy organic because it certifies that the food was created a certain way. It actually has standards and accountability towards the company. And so as an idea, I just felt like, hey, this is what next generation capitalism is going to look like.
They are going to change the world. And ultimately, maybe we don't even maybe the goal is for us to actually not even need this certification once it becomes the norm. But for now, we do need this certification. And so when I read the book, so I read the B Corporation handbook.
And I was just deeply inspired by what really brought about this organization and why they wanted to do this. I knew that in HelpScout, we wanted to build a big company. We wanted to build a company that would lead the SMB segment of a market, a big one.
And so I knew that from the ground level, from the legal bylaws and sort of stakeholder governance level, I would wanna put in a framework that could really stand the test of time. And they really advocated. So the b corp certification folks are the ones that advocated for public benefit corporations and the actual legislation that needed to be passed across all sorts of different states.
And so I just felt like this is a movement I wanna be part of. And so it did take us probably from the I probably read the book maybe eighteen months before we we got the full certification. And the reason it takes a while is because there's a lot of you know, you have to take this effectively a big quiz outlining the way that your company operates.
And you get a score at the end of it. And then there's a bunch of ways that you can perform far better or improve the programs in your company. There's there's a lot of ways that you can get a better score. And so basically, you continue to create new programs.
You continue to create, new documentation for whatever it is that kinda helps you get the the a score, that can that can result in a certification for you. So that's what takes a lot of time. And then, like, the actual paperwork probably just took three or four months, to process.
But I had to get every shareholder to sign off on becoming a public benefit corporation. The legal paperwork associated with that was relatively challenging. It took some real time. But boy, I'm so proud of it. And I actually think that it's a really strong statement for customers and for visitors to our website to see that we're a certified B corporation.
That's starting to hold real weight. And it's starting to really fulfill the mission that they had many years ago when they created this organization. And so we just wanted to be part of it. It's all about contributing maybe just a page or two to that playbook and and helping to shape capitalism for the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Maybe just, Nick, it would be helpful to get a little bit more context about HelpScout. So you said two thousand eleven, you found it was founded. You're one of the cofounders. How many how many staff have you got? How many customers have you got?
What levels of revenue are you at? Any what what kind of shape can you give us there? Yeah. So we have more than eleven thousand customers all over the world in a hundred forty countries. And we we are deeply passionate about customer service.
I think that especially for a small business, customer service is one of your biggest differentiators. It's your most effective marketing tool. And so as someone who's so passionate about small businesses and seeing more of them succeed in the world, We just wanted to create tools that really made your customer support a differentiator, a real differentiator in maybe a crowded market, or just reflected certain values that you wanna be about as a company.
Like, before we founded the company, we certainly had these values that we wanted to treat customers a certain way. And when I looked in the market and I tried all these other different help desk products, I just found that they they put barriers between us and the customer.
I had to launch some customer portal. All the emails looked like they were sent by some robot. They had ticket numbers, and, please reply above this line. It wasn't the experience that I prided myself on being able to provide to customers. Any system that I'm using should be invisible so I can connect and build a relationship with the customer.
But that that sort of thing didn't exist in the market. And that's why we said, you know what? This we're passionate about customer support. We're passionate about small business. And we're passionate about great customer service being a thing, being a big deal to businesses.
And so we just felt like this was something I could spend several decades of my life working on, and I would be excited about it. So today, like I said, eleven thousand customers and about one hundred and ten people working across eighty different cities and really excited about the future.
This idea of delivering great service even post pandemic is so important. It's never gonna stop being important to small businesses. So we're we're building a long term business here that we're really excited about. Hopefully, it'll outlive me. Yeah. You don't you don't hear tech founders say that very often that their business will outlive them.
But, yeah, it's a it's a I guess that was the ambition of many sort of company founders in previous eras. We seem to have become more accustomed to a quick flip relatively speaking. When you when when so when you started talking about, you know, you had and your team had the purpose driven incentives and ideals, and then you decided to to formalize it, I guess, through b corp.
Is that a conversation that was driven by the leadership team, alone, or did that involve the rest of the employees? Did it cut did some of it come from the bottom up? How did that play out? These ideas were originally the ideas of the founders, most definitely.
I've worked with my cofounders for sixteen years, so way longer than HelpScout, but are very much part of the fabric of who we are in founding the company. I like to tell the story of, the person who leads our people ops team today.
And, she joined the company several years ago. And we created our core values as a company, by interviewing everyone on the team and saying, hey. What's really important to you? What kind of business do you wanna be part of? What kind of business do you wanna be Do you what do you want the company you work for to be about?
And so our core values as a company, which is really a reflection of the kind of company we wanna build and a lot of these B Corp principles, it comes from the whole team. And I'm so proud of that. So we're really just trying to execute on the vision that our teammates have had for many years and the core values that seem important to them.
And that's why I say a lot of these ideals are common sense. If you interview your own employees and your own team, you'll find that the purpose of the business and the purpose, the mission behind the work that these folks are doing is just as important as the compensation.
It's not one or the other. It's both. They want to be fairly and well compensated for the work that they're doing, but they want to see their work have an impact that they can be extremely proud of for the rest of their career.
And so being able to foster both of those within a company culture is how to build something that lasts. And so it's always been a big part of it's been kind of a collective idea that we've had as a team. And one that we hope stands the test of time, getting back to creating HelpScout and building a company that outlast me.
I don't consider myself a serial entrepreneur. I have no desire to start another thing. Maybe I will, but I I just I wanna keep working on this thing. Building something that really is built to last, building something that does last a long period of time is quite an achievement.
So I'm just I'm more attracted to that idea than to starting a bunch of different companies. That's just it's a different different speed for me, I guess. It's it's interesting that, you know, the different entrepreneurs that you that you come across. Some people are are people who just wanna start new things all the time.
Some people really hate the scrappy crappy part at the beginning and just wanna come in when there's lots of money in the bank and a hundred person team and that they can scale it to a thousand people or whatever. But you it feels like you've you've found what you wanna be doing for a long time.
On that, you mentioned the the long term stock exchange and Eric Reiss, pretty fascinating project, which which seems to be kinda getting a little bit more traction. Is that is that an endgame potentially for for HelpScout? Is that a natural home for b corps where, you know, there there is some you you maybe wanna have some kind of liquidity event, but it matches with the the ideals, the values.
Is that is that how that can take shape, do you think? Yeah. Potentially. I I I said for many years that I had no interest in taking HelpScout public because it seemed as though the system was flawed. And the system the the incentives of of the system weren't really aligned with how we were thinking about building a business.
And I'm so grateful to Eric and the team at the LTSC for coming up with an idea that re architected the system and said, hey, this is an exchange that's built for companies that have profit and purpose level principles. Right? They're building a long term business.
They're not just focused on delivering quarter after quarter and having a large base of shareholders that are basically just buying and selling their stock very quickly. You wanna you wanna have long term folks that are incentivized to be part of your journey for a very long period of time.
So by way of the the LTSC coming to market and getting SEC approval, I all of the sudden got very excited about the potential to build a public business. And for me, I'm not motivated by control or the amount of equity that I have in the business.
I I'd be happy to build a public company if we have the privilege of doing so, eventually. So we'll see how that goes. It's really awesome to see that option. And I'm still waiting for the first company to actually go public on this exchange and for us to establish new precedents here that are going make it a little easier for us.
But I'm such a big fan of the idea, and I can't wait to see it continue to to gain some momentum. So something you and I talked about, Ofer, was that the company started in Boston, but you are now in Boulder. And you're in Boulder, at least in part because you like snowboarding.
Because that that kinda leads into my last question, which is around success. And, you know, if one of the central parts of your talk was about having different that we can change the world if we change our definition of value. Likewise, perhaps, we need to change our definitions of success.
So for you You know, you've thought about this a lot. Obviously, what does what what matters to you? What does success look like for you? F U N, fun. I want to really and sincerely enjoy the work. I want to get up every day and feel genuinely excited about the people I'm working with, the ideas that I'm working on, and the customers that we serve.
And for me, remote is a big piece of that. It was so nice to be able to move and not really disrupt the company. I moved to Colorado and just love it here, love the weather and everything. But for me, it's just about creating a lifestyle that's also not a lifestyle business, but a lifestyle for myself that continues to energize me to go out and do my very best work.
And so, truly, what it means for me to be successful is to have fun doing the work. And if we're having fun doing the work, then so many other wonderful positive byproducts will come to come into the fold as a result. But there's not enough entrepreneurs thinking about, hey.
What would it take for me to do work that I am so excited? Every day I get up, I'm so excited to work on even though it's really hard. And for me, this is the kind of business that just I have an an unlimited fuel tank to work on.
And and I I feel so grateful and privileged to to have that opportunity. That's that's a good note to end on. I hope we hope you and I get to discuss the fun question again over over coffee or a beer. There's lots I'd like to talk to you about on that.
And I've I've got my own my own ideas about what success looks like in that regard. But for today, Nick, that's that's been tremendous. Great great talk. I think you've probably opened a lot of people's eyes around new paths that they can take.
B corp is b corp there are b corps in the UK. It is it is a path that people here can can pursue. So maybe we'll see some people digging into that on the back of this talk. If people wanna reach you, can they can they drop you an email, etcetera, if they wanna dig into it?
Yeah. Absolutely. I'm get in touch. I'm at nick francis on Twitter. And you can also just email me nick at help scout dot com. Love hearing from folks. Cool. Nick, that's all for today. But, yeah, let's do this in person sometime soon. And, it's great to chat. Take care.
Likewise. Okay, so we covered a lot of territory there today. That's our that's a wrap on the main sessions. We do have our partners and digital are running their session on the data ethics of finance, that's at five thirty. Tune in for that.
That's, I think there's going be a lot of interesting chat there. It's particularly around ownership of data, and who, how people owning their own data impacts the finance industry. So if you're in that space, you should check it out. On Thursday, we're back with an interview with Nandini Jami.
Some of you might have seen her speak at Turing Fest last year. She she's one of the co founders of Sleeping Giants, but also now has her own, her own organization called check my ads. She's doing phenomenal work. Katie referenced it earlier. She's she's taken on companies left and right and making the web a better place.
So we'll hear more about what the last year has looked like for her and how her career has kicked on since she was last in Edinburgh. But for today, that's a wrap and see you on Thursday.
