From A.I. to E.I.

Venture capital put $400 million into Bored Ape projects. In those same months I was sitting with social enterprises in Bangladesh and Africa doing work that saved lives. They asked me where to find ten thousand dollars.

Money was not short that year. Judgment was.

What E.I. stands for

Empathy, Ethical, Ecosystem. Innovation, Impact, Investment.

Pair one from each side and you get a question. Empathy and Innovation sit at the center of the grid, which is where the name comes from.

Two failures of asking

Volkswagen's defeat device was fine engineering. It ran in eleven million cars and cleaned up the emissions only while the car was being tested.

Infinite scroll was a neat piece of work too. The man who invented it has spent years since saying it should never have shipped the way it did.

Neither was a failure of intelligence. Nobody asked the question that would have stopped the work.

The nine questions

An ethic nobody can check is a preference. Each of the nine questions carries a measure, a paper and three real cases.

Mondragón shows why it has to be written rather than felt. A priest and a handful of his students put worker ownership and a limit on pay ratios into the founding documents at the start. Decades and tens of thousands of employees later, both are still there.

A founder's good intentions do not survive a bad year. A clause does.