Scaling a Business Through Charity: A Path to Growth or Self-Deception

AVAlexander Volchek

What actually constitutes true charity? Why do you want to say that business isn't just about money? Notice how the mission immediately falls apart. At the same time, some of the things this company communicates may seem questionable to me. That means there aren't nine hundred million; there aren't even five hundred million. There's a kind of mythical idea in society that every business must have a separate mission and value unrelated to the company's actual performance, its growth, its business, its profit, the value of the asset, or the existence of the business as an opportunity for professional development. Over the past few decades, this subject has been discussed so much, endlessly promoted as an essential idea: to grow as an entrepreneur or businessperson, to grow your company, to develop as a strong manager, you must carry, actively feel, and think about some separate idea—I'll call it mythical for now—that isn't connected to the main performance measures. People ask questions and constantly get into whole discussions: how do I find this mission? How do I define it? What should I actually do? They reach a certain level of profit.

Someone comes along and tells them: to keep growing, you need to come up with this goal. Words like “charity” are often used. People often talk about having this necessary social significance and set a percentage. Someone might say, for example, that we'll donate three percent of revenue to charity. Often there's an internal system of manipulation by personnel staff, HR, or business owners, who say that to have a great team, it's very important for the company to have a mission. Write in the comments on the channel—write now—whether you've encountered a situation in your business or the company where you work where this mission, these external values, were imposed on you. It would be interesting to hear how well they did or didn't match the person imposing them. Or, as an entrepreneur, did you want to introduce this? Were you able to? Did it have the effect you expected? Because the question here is always about expectations. And support the channel: like this video right now and subscribe. It really helps the channel grow. In this video, I want to examine this in detail, sort out the causes and effects, so we can all look together at what actually constitutes true charity, a real mission, and a real social purpose for a company.

And does it matter for growing ten times, a hundred times larger? For growing consistently over decades? Or is it unrelated to business performance and results? Does engaging in charity build you into a strong, expansive person, a true professional? Or does engaging in charity lead to your actual, complete deterioration? When you're fifty, will you reap the consequences and suffer enormously inside, feel emptiness, disappointment, tragedy, a loss of meaning in different areas? Lose your own strength? Does having charity in the company, this mission, develop you as a person, not just as a strong entrepreneur, manager, or professional working for a company, but also as a friend, a good relative, a good husband or wife, father, son, daughter—a good, real person overall? Or does it diminish you and make you sleep badly? Whatever time you go to bed, you still sleep badly. These are the main points we'll use to ground today's discussion. This subject is incredibly important, because an enormous number of people live in a great illusion. Expectation followed by disappointment can bring enormous tragedy.

How important it is to know and understand this, to truly understand what's actually happening. Can a company owner invent a mission or some grand social purpose and orient themselves toward it, while being a person who has nothing in common with that purpose? For example, remaining someone who deceives everyone in ordinary life. Someone interested exclusively in their own interests, their own personal gain. Someone who will always choose money when a problem arises, who is really doing business only for themselves. Or who says, “First I'll take care of myself, then I'll contribute to the world.” Yet at the same time, to grow quickly, they need to contribute to the world. When a difficult situation arises, which side will they choose? Will they choose profit or helping other people? And the opposite situation: someone is constantly helping others, wanting to truly help them. Not imposing their own opinion or expectations, but truly helping, hearing these people and understanding what they actually want. Offering them honesty, truth, and love. If someone is honest with everyone, do they need to invent some enormous social purpose for their company? Turn it into something that needs to be written on the wall, on the website, in special books, and communicated to every employee?

Or will that person act that way in any case? Why tell anyone about it? Do you really need to tell them? Those are two major poles. And here's where the most important mechanism lies: why do you want to define this mission? Why do you want to say that the business isn't just about money? Why do you want a goal outside business performance? For what purpose? Someone says, “You won't be able to grow and earn more money because you don't have a social mission.” So you want to bring benefit to the world because you want to increase your own money and your own gain? Why deceive everyone, then? Simply tell everyone inside the company that we want to increase our money and our own gain. Then go ahead and grow. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean there's nothing wrong with doing business for money. It's probably one of an entrepreneur's main goals. Just as with an employee coming to work: most people come to work to earn money, to receive a salary. Some people come because they want professional growth. Some people start a business because they truly want that business to help people.

But then that business has a different purpose. These organizations even have a different designation. They're called nonprofits or charitable organizations. They aren't called limited liability companies. They aren't corporations.

That's what they're called: an organization engaged in nonprofit activity. Its purpose is set out accordingly. The purpose of a limited liability company is to make a profit. The purpose of a nonprofit is to pursue some activity—not necessarily helping other people, but something unrelated to commerce overall. So there's no profit as such, no profit. It's connected to developing something. Why do you need to know and understand this? So that when you're afraid and someone catches you in that state—for example, when you're struggling to grow your business, or someone hooks you with the idea that you can't grow further because you don't have this kind of goal—you don't remain in an illusion. I'm certainly not trying to dissuade you or convince you not to run a business that helps other people. I'm certainly not saying that making a profit in business is what matters and that what happens to your customers doesn't matter. The point is that if you're honest, honest with other people, you simply won't run a business that deceives them. And what difference does it make what kind of business it is? People around us say things like, you should work in education because it benefits people.

“Selling cement doesn't benefit anyone. It's bad, so I won't sell cement.” That's very strange, because cement benefits people too. It makes it possible to build roads, homes, and many other things. It affects people's lives and destinies. Cement. Education, meanwhile, can cause enormous losses. I think if you ask twenty people you know whether their education had only a positive effect on them, or whether the positive effects outweighed the negative, you'll find an enormous number of negative effects. It doesn't matter whether it's elementary, secondary, higher education, or something else. Nowadays, of course, short programs have begun appearing where people supposedly receive only benefits. Supposedly only benefits. The question is: did they spend that time usefully or not? Something interesting happened just the other day. My eight-year-old son went to a trial chess lesson. He generally knows how to play chess, and I'm looking for a teacher for him. After the lesson, someone at the school asked me, “Alexander, did he like it?” I said, “Yes, he liked it.” “Does he want to take lessons?” “Yes, he does.” They said, “That's wonderful! Do you have any questions?” I said, “Here's my concern: he won't be taking lessons with this teacher.”

They asked, “Why won't he be taking lessons with this teacher?” Because I think this teacher will teach him to play chess, but will very probably bring something into my son's life that I wouldn't want brought into it. I wouldn't want my son to acquire certain skills or develop a certain way of thinking, and he will inevitably pick those up from this teacher. When you study with a teacher in an open state, you absorb more than the subject. You absorb that person's thinking, their approaches, their world and their perception. I said, “I don't want my son to absorb this person's approaches.” It's remarkable how often we may fail to notice what brings benefit and what brings harm. The school says it benefits people. What benefit? That virtually every child needs chess for strong, healthy development. I agree with that. I agree that chess has a fairly good, positive effect on a child's development, on a whole range of factors. But besides chess itself, there are the teachers, who bring certain things with them. What will they bring? Along with the benefits of chess, even if my child continues with it, might they bring something else that causes much greater loss and much greater problems for my child?

Notice how the mission immediately falls apart, immediately falls apart. The whole illusion falls apart. The teacher, the salesperson, the company itself, and the owners all seem closely aligned with this mission. Yet it falls apart because it communicates one part, not the full picture. In this case, the full picture can only be realized by having particular teachers. There's no other way. Could you explain what I'm saying now to this teacher? I think it's almost impossible. When the school asked me for feedback, I said, “I'm sorry, I probably can't tell you any more or give you more information. It's extremely difficult. I can't describe why I have this particular feeling about the teacher. Besides, it's your right to choose your teachers. But this teacher isn't right for me.” One of the main areas in business that immediately conflicts with any mission of this kind is the marketing department, especially in companies with highly developed, systematic, large marketing and sales operations. As soon as a company has this enormous marketing machine consuming large numbers of leads, and salespeople calling everyone indiscriminately in huge volumes, the idea of social significance, of a social mission, immediately collapses.

In this case, it becomes almost impossible to discern that social mission. I'm talking about marketing and sales now; it becomes very difficult. Some companies manage it. But again, how exactly do they manage it? When a company says it offers help, benefit, and personal development, how much is it actually helping people, truly helping them? How much does it truly serve that purpose? Take Apple. It probably does a fairly good job in terms of the ideas it communicates. I really like the company. At the same time, some of the things it communicates may seem questionable to me, because they will be questionable to an enormous number of people around the world, from the perspective of certain values. They'll raise different questions for different people, so that internal alignment won't be there. In this case, because there's a mission, any arguments and conflicts will irritate people. Take search-engine companies that communicate a mission or goal like this. “Everything can be found,” for example, from a well-known search engine in the Russian-speaking world. But can everything be found there? Or have some things been blocked from search because a particular law was passed? Or are some things blocked because of certain social values and norms?

Can you really search for everything? What algorithm does it use? Is searching truly easy to help people, or is it made difficult to earn money from contextual advertising, as many other search engines do? What is the main foundation and focus behind the business? Once again, citing these companies doesn't mean they're communicating something bad. In fact, many missions and values appear in companies once they become very large and publicly traded. So as you develop, with a small business, or plans to start one, or while working for a company, people come and begin imposing this idea of a compulsory external value and external charity. The one thing you can do here and now is begin with yourself. How do I act toward other people, not necessarily customers? How do I act toward the people I interact with on the team, at work, inside the company? I come in and interact with them every day. How do I interact with them? Or am I the kind of manager who loves customers, but whose employees—

...customers, while I push my employees incredibly hard and am ready to squeeze everything out of them to get the final result. It's very interesting. To meet these goals, growth targets, performance measures, a particular valuation, and the parameters investors or the market need, am I willing to do things that contradict my inner feelings and understanding of another person's freedom, or am I not? The question of charity will arise everywhere, absolutely everywhere in your life, whether you run a business, are an employee, or are simply living. It comes up when you need to help a school, your friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger on the street, in any store, anywhere, in any country or organization. What is your real inner motive? What are you doing? Are you sending money out of spite, to get back at other people? Are you sending money because it improves your social standing? Are you sending money to manage your taxes properly? Are you sending money to truly, sincerely help people who could benefit from it? Or are you sending money because you feel you need to? There's no right answer here, and you can do as you wish. The most important thing you can do is not deceive yourself at that moment: tell yourself the real truth about why you're doing it.

Only through such action is true growth and expansion as a person possible. That is what true expansion means: developing your personal structure, your spiritual being. True expansion as a professional works through truly understanding cause-and-effect relationships. Even where you act for your own benefit—where you act endlessly for your own benefit—of course, that won't develop you very much as a person. In the future, you'll drown in endless illusions and encounter more and more, and more, and more, and more, and more tangled obstacles in your life. But at least you'll stand on firm ground professionally, because you'll honestly understand causes and effects. You won't deceive yourself the way people do when they cite business figures they've never actually calculated. I have a YouTube channel about technology news and insights from Silicon Valley. We have a podcast there, hosted by four of us. We were recording a podcast about Telegram and Pavel Durov being detained in France. We discussed it; by the time this video comes out, there may already be various updates. The point was that we discussed how it would or wouldn't affect the technology world or messaging apps.

That's the focus of that channel. But there's an important point we discussed: the modern world is mired in lies about numbers. Telegram is a very clear example. People say it has nine hundred million users, while in reality, the largest monthly user population is in India, with a hundred million people. Russia has thirty-something million, America thirty million, Brazil twenty-six million, somewhere else another twenty-five million. After that, the numbers fall sharply. That means there aren't nine hundred million; there aren't even five hundred million. So who's there? Bots and multiple registrations. If they're bots, they aren't users. I could generate five hundred billion bots. Or there was a time when you could register without a phone number. You could probably create an enormous number of bots. Or there are farms that create bots. There are farms that create bots. There was a very interesting discussion about this when Elon Musk was buying Twitter, now X. He said you'd inflated certain metrics to raise the valuation, and Twitter's user count wasn't real. He proposed estimating the actual number of users by sampling a hundred Twitter accounts and checking, in that random sample of a hundred accounts, how many were real and how many were bots.

We live in a world where people constantly cite numbers that aren't real. Numbers that aren't real. When you personally state and spread information that isn't real or verified, you deteriorate as a professional. You deteriorate in your professional development. You may perhaps gain something somewhere. It isn't done for no reason; it's done to increase your value, your importance. But you deteriorate as a professional and as a person. This is what I described very clearly when I said that even if you bring harmful things into your company, don't deceive yourself. Don't build an illusion on that basis, a business built on illusion. It will give you a false model, false unit economics. You'll simply lose the business. And in any case, you'll lose the employees to whom you communicate illusions and false goals, because those people will be living in their own illusions, like the chess teacher I mentioned. He has his own sense of where he works, where he is, and what he's doing. It's unlikely anyone can influence that perception, especially if you've drawn your company's mission on a sheet of paper, on a website, a poster, or a billboard.

And started attending special coaching sessions focused on the importance of external goals for a business.