Growth, for Good
The next decade will determine whether technology serves or fractures human flourishing. Founders are writing that story. Here’s what we hear from you—and why we’re inviting you to build with us.
Dear Founders,
In the past two years, I've sat with hundreds of builders and investors across America and the world.
We talk about how the world will be vastly different ten years from now. How the meaning of human work, dignity, and sense of self will be shaped by technology emerging today.
That's why you're building. To shape a better future. And to win.
From San Francisco's AI labs to MIT's tough tech community, from Orange County’s Gundo Bros to Seattle, New York, to Utah. From Toronto to London, Singapore to LATAM to India and beyond.
In your relentlessness I'm also hearing something elemental. The longing to build something transformative and worthy of building.
What I Keep Observing
Every conversation starts similarly. Your project, your vision, your stubborn belief that this time will be different. The backdrop is remarkably consistent: used furniture, founders who lost track of meals, stacks of pizza boxes, bulk snacks from Costco.
But somewhere in the middle, something shifts. Your founder bravado drops, privately. Behind closed doors, I keep hearing:
"I'm moving fast and that's not negotiable. But sometimes I need a framework that lets me think through what I'm transforming – and doesn't sacrifice my odds of success.”
Some of you are relieved to talk about responsible innovation without judgment. Others hate it. It feels constraining, like something good was weaponized against builders.
I understand why founders bike shed around whether responsible innovation actually matters. It’s safer to debate the concept than to wrestle with the specific ways your technology might reshape someone's livelihood.
But every conversation goes in the same direction. Back to why you started building in the first place. Maybe you started tinkering in the lab or fell in love with the joy of building. But now it's your way of making the world better.
Vector: Speed Plus Intention
The most interesting founders I'm meeting aren't just moving fast. You're moving with direction. Speed plus intention. A vector advantage.
Vector is:
Stripe thinking about fraud prevention from day one rather than retrofitting compliance later.
Anthropic publishing safety research while scaling language models.
Discord building community tools that prioritize user safety over pure engagement metrics.
Shopify empowering small businesses to compete rather than extracting rent from them.
Vector isn't about being nice. It's about being smart. And it’s about growth. In free societies, skepticism kills adoption. Slow adoption means competitors get to market first and set global standards. Building with intention isn't a moral luxury. It's a competitive necessity. The smartest builders also recognize they need to be at the table to inform smart public policy necessary for startups to compete. It can’t be left only to Big Tech who can litigate and lobby their way through legal ambiguity.
Here's what I keep seeing: it's faster to build trust into your approach from day one than to retrofit it after you've triggered a backlash that slows your momentum.
Scaling responsibly across the globe is infinitely harder than building responsibly in one city, which is exactly why these practices need to be tested and embedded early. If you can't figure out a methodology in your home market, you're going to have a hell of a time getting it right when you're scaling globally.
At the earliest stages, you have maximum leverage. Every decision becomes part of your company's DNA before it scales to impact thousands of employees, millions of users, and countless communities.
The Skepticism You've Inherited is a Competitive Disadvantage
Here's what I keep seeing: a constant drain that goes beyond the obvious lack of sleep.
The divorce of technology from its human impact is forced. It takes constant effort to ignore what tech can do to real people. That severance is exhausting.
You feel it when you’re:
Building recommendation algorithms but won't let your own kids use the platform.
Automating workflows but can't articulate the transition plan to the people whose jobs you're changing.
Collecting personal data you wouldn't want your competitors to have on you.
This isn't external pressure. This is realizing you're hitting your targets but missing your point.
While you wrestle with these questions privately, the world around you is turning against technology itself. Not just Big Tech. Technology as a concept.
It's natural for brilliant builders to get nerd sniped by fascinating technical problems. There's genuine thrill in solving algorithmic puzzles. It's more comfortable territory than mapping out how your innovation will percolate through real people's lives.
You didn't create these problems. You've inherited them. The backlash started with automation that displaced workers without adequate support. It intensified with Big Tech's concentration of power. Now that skepticism extends to every startup, including yours.
The irony is stark: commit to building responsibly and the world's skepticism will tempt you to abandon it entirely. But hard things are hard for a reason.
Who The Skeptics Are (And Why They Matter)
The skeptics aren't faceless critics. They're journalists writing about AI displacement, watching newsrooms get whittled away. Community leaders whose manufacturing towns were hollowed out by previous technological waves. Policymakers drafting regulation because they've seen what happens when technology scales without guardrails. Parents worried about what platforms are doing to their kids.
Their concerns are legitimate. The question is how you respond. And here we're borrowing from Viktor Frankl: there's space between stimulus and response. Between the backlash and your reaction to it. Between the problem you inherited and how you choose to build next.
In that space lies your freedom to choose how to respond. To build differently, not reactively.
The Tension Is The System Today
The tension you feel between speed and intention is a feature of today's ecosystem. It's the reality of building powerful technology in 2025.
The internal pressure you feel to think through consequences while moving fast? That pressure is calibrated correctly. You're building technology that matters more than previous generations.
The weight of that responsibility isn't something to compartmentalize away from consequential business decisions. It's something to navigate skillfully. Premature optimization looks like waiting for the perfect moment or airtight framework immune from criticism to integrate second and third order effect thinking.
The reality is that most founders don't begin with that level of intention. After all you just want to bring an amazing product into the world. But those who add intention earliest reinforce competitive advantage. The goal is to navigate it while pursuing the commercial wins you need to survive and scale.
What We're Building Together
This is why Responsible Innovation Labs exists. Not to resolve the tension. It's a baseline constant these days. Our purpose is to help you navigate it while building companies that win.
We're not your outside lawyers. They are essential for keeping you out of legal trouble. When you're trying to build the future, the most useful advice lives in the extraordinary gray space inside legal boundaries.
We're not consultants either. Most of the big firms are still working off the old playbooks. They can't help you move fast with intention because the new ways of winning aren't yet universally accepted.
We're not your investors either. They want your success. They're providing oxygen via capital. You know different incentives and constraints are at work. Portfolio considerations and fund timelines that are essential to their business. We're focused on our lane of helping you win commercially when you innovate responsibly.
We won't pretend there's a universal framework for navigating conflicts among competing priorities. Context always matters. We believe intention and responsibility need to be in the room where decisions happen.
What we're building is public infrastructure for founders wrestling with these questions. Think of it as a resource that shouldn't have to be reinvented by every startup:
Peer Learning Networks: Direct connections with other founders building today. Not theoretical frameworks, but real community with people who are facing and actively working through these tensions.
Tactical Guidance: We share emerging best practices from founders scaling successfully with intention. Frameworks adapted for the narrow bandwidth and limited resources you actually have.
Pattern Recognition: We connect you to builders who've navigated this before. We help you get to smart decisions, faster. How to embed intention without bureaucracy.
Collective Problem-Solving: Some challenges are bigger than any individual startup. Confronting public backlash. Wrestling with workforce transition. Public policy that helps startups move faster, not just Big Tech.
The pattern is consistent: this tension affects every founder building consequential technology, and most are trying to figure it out alone. That's inefficient and risky when the stakes are this high. You shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel or go it alone.
People arrive at RIL differently. Builders starting from scratch. Scalers looking to increase TAM. Market leading startups building for tomorrow's challenges. Different motivations, different timelines. Same recognition: building technology that serves both growth and human flourishing is why we're in this work.
We're still at the beginning of the beginning of our journey. There's more tactical work ahead—collective problem-solving applied to emerging challenges, implementation frameworks, community engagement playbooks, policy navigation, technical safety.
The foundational question is whether you want to figure this out together or go it alone.
You Matter More Than You Know
You're not just building companies. You're building the technological foundation for human flourishing over the next centuries. The breakthroughs happening now will determine whether technology serves human potential or fractures it.
The tension you feel is your compass, not a constraint. The future belongs to those who build it intentionally. If you've been thinking this way too, let's talk.