
Ask HN: How do you start a company that can last 100 years? - krm01
With pretty much all focus and resources for startups that are meant to grow quickly, make as much money as possible etc. I wonder how one would go about the thinking process of starting something that can last 100+ years?
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WheelsAtLarge
I've been thinking about this myself. I have no complete answers but I think
that defining a way for good leadership to continue thru time is probably the
first part.

I look at IBM as an example. Their one constant has been their ability to pick
a leader that carries them forward. They are not as successful now as they
have been in the past but they continue as a profitable business.

I also look at what makes a successful country and can get some ideas from
that.

The U.S. has been around for a few hundred years. I think the primary reason
has been the founding father's ability to define the country and its values
via the U.S. constitution. Every time there's a dispute we go back to it to
remind us what the country is all about. So this means that if you define
something similar to a constitution it is extremely important to the company's
long term success for it to be well defined. What should be in it? That's the
100-year question. I have ideas but I don't really know.

I really don't think that it matters what the service or product is as long as
it fills a need. Leadership and fidelity to core values are problably the key
to staying around.

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staticautomatic
I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff at a structural level, mostly
due to an intense if idle curiosity about it. I don't claim to have all the
answers (or the right ones) but I have some ideas. They stem from the
perspective that this is fundamentally a question of how you design an
_organization_ that can endure for 100 years, and the observation that
"business" problems tend to (perhaps only) kill companies which are not
structured to anticipate them and deal with them when they arise.

Here are some things I would consider absolutely essential:

1) A fundamentally simple governance structure. It could ultimately be huge or
many-layered or whatever in practice but it has to be structurally simple
enough that you can reason about how it is intended to handle any given thing.
The worst kinds of cracks are liable to form if it encounters something
unknown and has no mechanism either for handling it or deciding how to handle
it.

2) The governance framework must be backed by a living document codifying
policies which a) Are affirmative; b) Are as unambiguous as possible; c)
Theoretically conflict with each other as little as possible; d) Include
mechanisms for adjudicating policy conflicts; and e) Articulate their
rationale. The company has to be willing to shut down rather than violate the
most important of these policies. I like to call this approach "values
nationalism."

3) The organization must evolve its formal policies as it makes decisions.
Otherwise you're going to end up with common law. Reasonable minds can
disagree about whether common law is a good idea in government but I'll
venture to say it's always a bad idea in business.

4) The organization must be vigilant about predicting, monitoring, and
mitigating internal threats to its integrity which arise out of perverse
incentive structures. It must be willing to sacrifice short term money in
order to eliminate perverse incentives.

5) The organization must have mechanisms in place which allow it radically
reorganize itself in response to external threats (recession, regulatory
capture, takeovers, etc.).

I may have left one or more important things out. But the vast majority of
individual "business" issues are going to fall under one of these categories.

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rdtwo
Buy in during the fire sale at the bottom

