A Philosophy
of Business

There is a George Orwell quote I come back to often that reads, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” 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. Marshall McLuhan reminds us that “there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” Most of us lack the awareness, let alone the willingness, to contemplate what is happening.

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 as a signal that they are optimists. Abundance sounds great, until you start thinking about what abundance might lead to: waste, inequality, etc. Or maybe there is an abundance of something bad, like gambling or junk food. 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 infinite digital capability and also infinite slop.

As such, 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 arguably 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. It has led to a wide array of products and content that exist for no reason anyone can articulate beyond the fact that they were possible to build.

Do I sound like a pessimist? I hope not. I was recently chatting with a friend who assumed, because of my distaste for so much of startup culture and tech-right politics, that I must be an anti-capitalist! And Native, it follows, must be “kind of like a B-Corp.” Neither are true. I think the business of technology is the single most important and impactful avenue to change the world for the better, and we must take it more seriously.

Native’s default state is optimism. We are not anti-tech. We believe in the necessity of every founder, company, and market participant to contemplate what is happening, and to set course accordingly.

Taking the business of technology seriously requires its participants, as McLuhan might say, to reflect on what is happening. 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.

The name Native comes from the phrase “native to our build environments,” which is an extension of the idea that we shape our tools, and then they shape us. Tools don’t just shape their users, but the environments in which things are built shape the things themselves in ways that are largely invisible.

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, which means you will build a company that is generic and entirely 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—and that will continue to matter over the next decade—where the founders haven’t pushed back. Those companies have coherence throughout what they’re building, the voice, the culture, how they hire, and how they write. The business is a living, breathing product of their own philosophy. The founders did 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 enough that the right believers—customers, investors, builders—find it.

The most common thing I hear on a first call with a founder is some version of, “We know what we’re building, we just need help saying it,” which is rarely true. Generally, what really exists is a feeling or a set of instincts, a fuzzy conviction that is making everything else that much harder to figure out. The work is downstream of that incomplete thinking, so whether they realize it or not, the team ends up leaning on the market. They’ll use the same language as investors and influencers that 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. That’s a trade most people aren’t willing to make, which is exactly why the ones who do stand out.

Developing a unique point-of-view comes after reading and writing and reading and writing, and finally testing those assumptions and ideas until you’ve reached an escape velocity… 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 well-crafted words, rooted in a firm set of beliefs and principles and perspective, 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—which is how you end up building someone else’s vision instead of your own. This is the foundational problem of brand and marketing, and it is even more important in a world where it feels impossible to cut through the noise consistently.

But there is a second reason, and it may be the more consequential one. We now have unlimited access to labor through language models, and while the rest of the market is optimizing for more activity through any means necessary (gambling, war, surveillance, etc.), it also means that the world is more malleable than ever. Great writing is no longer just how you communicate to people. It is how you direct machines. The clearer your ambitions and goals, from the micro to the macro, 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.

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.

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 enough of those companies exist, then the culture of technology starts to shift, and maybe the environment won’t default to slop anymore.

Native exists to make it possible for the people who care, who write, and who reflect on what should be to win every game they play, through their words and their work.