Don't Be Evil, Inc. | A public benefit venture studio

Why does a company like this need to exist?

People are turning on technology, and on AI.
The sentiment has turned hard, and they are not wrong to feel that way.
The technology is not the problem. The incentives of the people who build it are.
It is being pointed at extracting money from people: artificial user lock-in, engagement maximisation, addictive loops, squeezing every cent out of you.
We are at a fork in the road.
The environment you live in shapes what you do, and what you do shapes who you become. Technology companies are doing what is right for their bottom line first. This can lead to a very dystopian world very soon.

What can we do?

We're building this studio to show a different path. To show that we can build a good tech business with strong social benefits.

This is in our charter: the studio is incorporated as a Delaware public benefit corporation, which means the law requires the board to balance that good against profit in every decision rather than put profit first.

Every product we build follows the same set of clear and strict ethical rules.

Only build products that make people's lives actually better.
If something good already solves the problem, we do not build a rival. We would rather point you to it.
Never monetise your attention or your choices.
No paid placements, no sponsored picks, no conflict of interest, not even a disclosed one. And we do not build addictive loops: we focus on helping you get the work done, never time spent in our product.
Make it easy for you to switch. No lock-in.
We only want to be your preferred solution. If we are not, take everything with you, in a format you can actually use, wherever you are going. No export request, no hidden cancellation button.
Treat privacy as a human right, not an optional feature.
Your data is never sold, never shared, never used to train anything for anyone else. Wherever it is technically possible we build so that we cannot read it at all.

But isn't that a recipe for failure?

Maybe! That is exactly what this venture is here to find out. Three things make us believe it can work:

Being AI-native changes the economics completely, and allows for new business models.
Building software used to take real capital: developers, go to market, all of it expensive. Now AI agents run the studio itself, marketing, support and operations, not only the code. The saving goes into the price, and products get built that were never worth anyone's time before.
Big, bloated software gets replaced by software built for what you actually need.
Products used to be made for the average person, because serving a niche was too expensive. The long tail was always there. It was never affordable. Building for it at quality is the hard part today, and that is the part we do.
When software is this abundant, people pick a company they can trust.
Anyone can build an app now. What is scarce is a company who truly cares about you and shows it day after day.

What does it look like if this works?

Our goal is to build 100 products that help more than 10 million people every day.
Those ten million are playing their best game: better at their craft, focused, spending their time where they have the most leverage, with room left for a rich life beyond work. They would scream if you took the products away, and just as loud if we changed the values they were built on. Behind us, a new line of public benefit companies with a real ethos at the core.

What are we starting with?

A new kind of Personal CRM. You care about people and still lose touch with them, and it is not for lack of caring: every tool built for this made you do the filing, so nobody kept it up. This one does the upkeep itself, so you can be great with the people you already know. It never writes to anyone for you.

That is the first product we're working on. We're very passionate about it, and we see the impact it has on our own work. We will share with you the other products we have in the pipe as we get closer to working on them.

Ha. And where does the name come from?

Don't Be Evil opened Google's code of conduct for eighteen years. Alphabet swapped it for "do the right thing" in 2015, and by 2018 it had slid to a single line at the very bottom of the page. This feels like a good illustration of what happened to the tech industry in the past ten years.

Ours goes in the charter, where taking it out is a change to the company rather than an edit to a webpage.