Running a Mission-Driven Business with Amir Nathoo

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, Co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Amir Nathoo. Amir is the Founder and CEO of Out School. Welcome to The Daily Bolster, Amir.

Amir Nathoo: Thanks so much. Glad to be here.

Matt Blumberg: So, here's the question I have for you today. You run what I would call a mission- driven or impact- oriented for- profit business, right? You have a mission statement which is: Inspire Kids to Love Learning. I have run lots of businesses, and I would not describe a single one of them as impact- oriented or anything like that. I've always been really envious of people who do run businesses like that because I feel like I'm always being a little apologetic somewhere along the way, like, " Hey, we're not curing cancer, but what we're doing is important, and let me tell you how," where there's something so inherently wonderful in the substance of what you're doing for humans. So my question to you is, what are the pros and cons of that? How do you think about that as a founder? Is it in fact all easier and better? Or are there some downsides?

Amir Nathoo: Totally. We are definitely a mission- driven business. We're very focused on the societal impact that we have as a business, and that does come with pros and cons and things that I continue to grapple with, and happy to share some of those. The key advantage of running an impact- oriented business is kind of obvious, but also worth reiterating, which is that it is inspiring to people. And what that means is that if you lean into it, and spend time on that advantage and really communicating what the impact is, why it's important, then it helps with hiring, it helps with retaining people and keeping people motivated, it helps with telling stories about your company that attract customers and investors. And sometimes it's also easy to forget that advantage when you're running an impact- oriented business. I've thought a lot about intentionally doubling down on that structural advantage of the domain in which we operate and the kind of company that we are. I see that as a key advantage. But one thing that maybe was a little surprising to me is it's not all roses, running an impact-oriented business. There are some challenges, and one that's maybe a little bit subtle, but I find that sometimes it can be seen or felt even by myself, but also team members and constituents of the company, that there is somehow a trade- off between doing the right thing and having that positive societal impact and building a scaled, profitable, sustainable business. It can be seen that some of the practices in business, which are maybe seen as more hard- nosed or tough, can be seen as being in contrast to the positive mission. I see the two hand- in- hand. It's impossible to have the societal impact you want unless it's supported by a sustainable organization, successful business. I think if you're going after something that's really important to you personally and really important to a lot of people personally, it deserves to be treated with the same urgency and ambition as a more financially oriented business. And actually, you want to take that energy and apply it to these very positive, but it can be seen as the opposite, and it's a very difficult thing to hire for people and maintain that idea internally that, yes, we're about societal impact, but that doesn't mean that we're not aggressive from a business standpoint. So it's a difficult cultural element to balance.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, I can see that. I could see, look, if you have to do a layoff, or even if you're terminating someone who's a middling performer or a weak performer, that they think of it as a nonprofit, but it's, in fact, not a nonprofit.

Amir Nathoo: Exactly, and I think one thing that I continue to grapple with, and that's an area of exploration of thought for me, and I think other impact- oriented founders, is this idea about how do you measure success if it's not only going to be with financial metrics. And one typical solution is what's called a double bottom line, and that is we have multiple criteria for success. We have our business metrics, and then we have our impact metrics. But I actually think that is not a good way to do it because it fundamentally sets them in opposition. And if you have that double bottom line, then, yeah, it's a mechanism for holding yourself accountable for impact, but you're constantly torn and constantly are framing it as a trade- off between business success and societal impact that you want. So I constantly think about how can you marry the two and create alignment of incentives in the company, in the market, in how you structure the product, to make those two things the same. That is, as the business scales, it's almost natural that positive cycle impact will flow. And so, I think about metrics a lot, the North Star metrics, and how can we craft an impact oriented North Star metric that still incorporates our business metrics, and it's still a work in progress for us. For us, we're trying to create a love of learning metric, which incorporates elements of scale, because, of course, we scale our business, of course, we can generate more love of learning, but of course, we also need to make sure that the bit is turned positive, that this is positive societal impact that we're scaling, and not negative.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. Super, super interesting. I really appreciate your perspective on this, and I think for those of us who don't, as I always say, have the luxury of running an impact- oriented business, it's nice to at least know that it comes with some challenges, because it clearly comes with benefits both for you as a CEO and leader, and also for society at large. Thank you for sharing all that with us today, Amir, Founder and CEO of Out School, Inspiring Kids to Love Learning.

Amir Nathoo: Absolutely. Thank you.