A PHILOSOPHY OF BUSINESS

Language is a tool, and like any widely adopted tool, it is also an environment. It shapes us in ways we do not see unless we are actively seeking to notice. The words we choose and the stories we tell influence the world far more than we can imagine. George Orwell once remarked that “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” And yet, most of our industry treats language as an afterthought, rather than the foundation on which everything is built.

Take the word “abundance,” a word that has taken on a freshly positive connotation in recent years thanks to technologists optimizing for it and political pundits using it to signal fresh ideas. Abundance sounds universally great, until you start thinking about what it might lead to, like waste, inequality, or an abundance of something bad entirely. It’s hard to argue whether something is good or bad without more information: Abundance of what? Allocated how? Decided by whom? The internet gave us abundant information and also abundant misinformation. AI is giving us abundant digital capability and also infinite slop.

I’ve previously argued that “agency” is not inherently good either. “You can just do things” is a useful corrective to institutional helplessness, but agency without intention or conviction is worse than not moving at all. A person with infinite tools and no sense of what they’re for will build things that don’t matter, faster.

And then there’s “acceleration,” which its proponents—the e/acc crowd and their fellow travelers—have never been able to ground in anything beyond the claim that building faster is self-evidently good. They simply build because it is possible to build.

Native’s default state is optimism. We are pro-technology and pro-markets, but we believe that power demands responsibility. Every founder, company, and market participant has an obligation to contemplate what they are building and set course accordingly. The default values of our industry are not laws of nature, rather they are choices made by specific people, and they can be made differently by people willing to take the time to write and think.

Moving back to language: if you don’t develop your own language, or at least maintain a level of intentionality in the words you choose, you will speak the environment’s language by default. You will describe your company in the terms investors expect, which means you will position yourself using the categories your industry established and inevitably build a company that is generic and uncompetitive in the long-run. The market, by default, is pushing you toward slop. And language shapes the market.

There aren’t many companies that actually matter where the founders haven’t pushed back. Those companies have coherence throughout what they’re building: the voice, the culture, the product, how they hire, and, most importantly, how they write. The business is a living, breathing product of their own philosophy. The founders do the work of figuring out very specifically what world they wanted to create and why.

We help founders develop their own philosophy of business, then articulate it clearly so that the right believers—your customers, investors, and collaborators—find it.

The most common thing I hear on a first call with a potential client is some version of, “We know what we’re building, we just need help saying it.” There is a fuzziness that makes everything else harder. Teams often end up leaning on the market, using the same language as the investors and influencers who support the A-words with no coherent philosophy of their own.

This is also what separates Native from the “storytelling-industrial complex.” There is no shortage of agencies and consultants eager to produce your videos, design your website, and build your content strategy. In most cases, there is no story to tell. Crafting the story is the harder, upstream work of figuring out what you actually believe, what makes you different, and why others should believe as well. It’s easier for companies to preach storytelling because the real work forces you to stand for something, and standing for something means you will inevitably lose business from those who disagree with you.

And then there is the growing cohort of “New Media” voices whose stated mission is to tell the story of technology and the broader industry in a positive light. We believe that a story about an industry that does not actively discourage companies enabling surveillance, endless war, gambling, and slop is not a story worth telling. The optimistic move is to demand more from the people building, and to help those working on something great to develop and articulate a strong worldview of their own.

Developing a unique point of view comes after reading and writing and reading and writing, and testing those assumptions until something holds… and even then it is an ongoing process.

Our goal at Native is to support this process. We are in the business of writing. We believe that words rooted in conviction can shape the operations and success of your business in ways nothing else can.

This is true first because clarity compounds. A company that can articulate what it believes and why it exists can align its team around what to build, move faster, become more legible to capital, and attract the right customers. A company that cannot will drift toward whatever the market rewards this quarter.

But there is a second reason, and it may be the more consequential one. We now have unlimited access to labor through language models. Great writing is no longer just how you communicate to people. It is how you direct machines. The clearer your ambitions and goals, the more powerfully you can leverage the new resources in front of you. It is your responsibility to point them toward a vision of the world that is remarkably better than what we have today.

They’ll attract the best people, build the most coherent products, and create the kind of loyalty that no amount of capital or content can manufacture.

If we are successful, the businesses we work with will be the ones that shape the future, because they did the harder, rarer work of deciding what should exist and why. They were committed to the labor of articulation.