The Importance of Trust in Startups

Today's episode is all about trust and responsibility—and how those qualities impact the cost of doing business and the work that's required for any company to be successful. And specifically, it's about something I'm calling the Trust-Profit Paradox. Simply put, you can't build trust and optimize for profit at the same time.

After losing my ish listening to The Verge's Nilay Patel stump Airbnb's Brian Chesky with a question about AI-generated images on the Decoder podcast, I started to think about the responsibility that companies like Airbnb have (or, rather, avoid). From there, my research took me to some truly unexpected places—like into mainstream management theory.

Footnotes:

• "The Pope Francis Puffer Photo Was Real In Our Hearts" by Eileen Cartter on GQ
• "'I can't make products just for 41-year-old tech founders': Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is taking it back to basics" on Decoder with Nilay Patel (audio & transcript available)
• "The Delusion of Profit" by Peter Drucker in Wall Street Journal
• "Cost of Capital" on the Harvard Business School blog
• "If you're getting ripped off, it's not surprising" featuring Niko Matouschek at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern
• "The Age of Customer Capitalism" by Roger Martin in Harvard Business Review
• "'Is Substack Notes a Twitter clone?': We asked CEO Chris Best" on Decoder with Nilay Patel

Join me for a workshop called "Tending Your Media Ecosystem" on Wednesday, May 31st at 1:30pm ET/10:30am PT—exclusively for paid subscribers to What Works. Get started for just $7/month!