Jimmy Wales

You know, we're building a free website.

high quality, neutral encyclopedia.

Like that's the basic purpose of Wikipedia.

And it really, that purpose runs through everything we do, every decision we make, all the policies, all of like what the organization does.

And without that, you end up going in circles.

Like if you don't quite know what you're doing,

And in many cases, you know, like a lot of business, like Airbnb, they had a clear purpose, like they knew what they were doing.

And that really helps a lot.

And then other organizations sometimes lack a clear focus and lack a clear purpose.

I mean, a lot of times, older, bigger companies that end up in like a conglomerate type of structure, they end up doing so many different things that nobody's quite sure what the point of the company is.

And sometimes that works, takes a hell of a lot of effort to make something like that work.

And oftentimes what actually works is spin out the division that's successful, but has nothing to do with anything else in the company because it's just distracting everybody.

But I think that that's one of the things, because once you have a clear purpose, then you start to have a metric by which you can make decisions.

You know, it's like, what should we do?

Actually, it's one of the things I think is very interesting in my personal experience for companies.

profit company boards versus nonprofit organization boards.

For profit company boards are much easier and much clearer in many cases, because usually in a for profit, you have strategic questions, all of that.

But there is something that you all share.

And there is an objective, which is we need to be profitable.

Like the company has to be sustainable.