Greed vs. Mission: A 100-Year Promise [New Normal - Silicon Valley]

In 2026, two technologies are poised to reshape the world: artificial intelligence (AI) and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) drugs, popularized in Korea as diet injections. Leading these fields are AI company Anthropic and pharmaceutical firm Novo Nordisk, respectively. What connects these seemingly disparate companies is a shared governance model: a foundation holds the majority of voting rights, superseding the interests of the for-profit entity.

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The two companies' message is clear: what makes a good company last is not the founder's will, but a structure that binds even the founder to their mission.

Novo Nordisk's story exemplifies this structure. Founded by the Krogh couple, one a Nobel laureate and the other a physician battling diabetes, their primary fear was not competitors but their own company's future self. They worried that the pursuit of profit could lead to price gouging, abandoning the "obligation of fair pricing." To preempt this, they embedded a safeguard in the company's structure: a non-profit industrial foundation owns the majority of shares and voting rights. The foundation's charter strictly prohibits the sale of these shares, a mechanism that has preserved the company's integrity for a century. This structure has allowed Novo Nordisk to dominate the market with obesity drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic, even surpassing Denmark's annual GDP in market capitalization in 2023. Despite a stock price drop in 2025, the foundation's charter prevented hostile takeovers or fire sales.

Anthropic follows a similar path. Before ChatGPT's emergence, founder Dario Amodei established the company as a public benefit corporation with a separate "long-term benefit trust." This trust is composed of AI safety experts who do not hold company shares but appoint members to the for-profit board. This structure enabled Anthropic to delay the release of its potentially risky "Mythos" model and even decline a $200 million Department of Defense contract. Such decisions, which might have led to a CEO's ouster in traditional companies, have instead fostered trust and made Anthropic a highly desirable workplace. The core message from both companies is clear: enduring success is not solely dependent on a founder's will but on a robust structure that binds even the founders to their mission.

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If the answer to 'who will protect the company's mission' is not written anywhere in the articles of incorporation, then 'no one will protect it.'

The article contrasts this with the typical startup landscape, where only 20% of U.S. venture-backed companies remain with their original founders as CEOs after three years. It questions the absence of such mission-driven structures in South Korea, where industrial foundation models are practically non-existent, and public foundations often serve to consolidate family control rather than safeguard a mission. The Novo Nordisk foundation, for instance, acts as a constraint on the founding family, not a tool for their control. The fundamental question for founders in the AI and biotech era is: who will protect the company's mission a decade from now? If the answer isn't enshrined in the company's charter, it likely won't be protected at all. Building a company that lasts 100 years, the article concludes, requires more precise structural design than simply more capital.

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To build a company that lasts 100 years, what is needed is not more capital, but a more precise structure.