What’s In It for the Kind in Business?
Christine Choi, Matt Hoffman, Caterina Fake, and Giorgos Tsetis and the case for kindness as strategy
“Can Kindness and Capitalism Coexist? Building Companies (and a World) that Don’t Treat People Like Shit”—that was the working title Christine Choi jotted down in a Google doc for a session she proposed she’d curate and host at our PolyOpportunity New York Retreat. It felt so direct and honest that we just kept it as is. The conversation that followed was just as candid, with Christine serving as the congenial host.
I first met Christine after the release of my book The Business Romantic. We connected because she worked for such a type at the time, Sir Richard Branson, and she herself has always struck me as the embodiment of kindness in business. Now a partner at the venture capital firm M13, Christine is the former head of communications for Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit, and The Spaceship Company, and she serves on the boards of KIPP NJ and Virgin Unite US.
In New York, she was joined by her M13 colleague Matt Hoffman (partner and head of people), Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr, former chair of Etsy, TIME 100 honoree, one of Business Insider’s Top 25 Women Investors, and an Angel Investor Hall of Fame inductee), and Giorgos Tsetis (co-founder of Nutrafol, acquired by Unilever), for a discussion on leadership, culture, hiring, and the systems that either enable or inhibit human flourishing.
Tim Leberecht, co-founder, House of Beautiful Business
Christine Choi: Thank you so much for being here. I feel self-conscious even saying or seeing that word: kindness. I feel self-conscious because I fear it makes me sound naive. It’s a squishy word. It feels like a nice-to-have kind of word. It feels a little soft.
But what we’re actually talking about is building innovative, high-performing organizations and systems that don’t treat stakeholders like shit and that don’t exploit or grind life down. And that’s not soft. That’s hard. It’s radical.
Kindness is about an abundance mindset over scarcity. It’s about long-term value and being consistent versus looking at short-term extraction. It’s about choosing to be empathetic and ethical.
I think right now we’re living in a leadership era of the strongman, of morally ambivalent leadership worship. We have let ourselves accept technologies in our lives that are polluting our minds and bodies.
It doesn’t have to be that way though, because we chose to create the conditions for this kind of leadership to thrive. And in that same way, we can choose a different model of leadership. And that’s what I want us to talk about, because I feel like everyone in this room is living a different model of leadership. We just don’t hear about it, because the machine we built prefers to sell ads and amplify fear, anxiety, and depravity.
I want to change that narrative. Narratives matter. Stories matter. Especially stories of good people who are trying to do good things.
And so I would like to get in the weeds and talk about how we can engineer kindness into products and organizational designs, and then get into leadership—how we show up ourselves in high-stakes situations.
I’d love for each of you to tell us a little bit about yourself. Matt, would you like to start?
Matt Hoffman: I’m one of Christine’s partners at M13. I lead the talent and people function—colloquially known as HR.
This event has so many brilliant speakers talking about such big ideas, so many transformative ways of thinking about how we can change the world. But it can be overwhelming to imagine the type of revolutionary thinking that’s going to be needed to create the world and the environment we want to live in.
For this session I want to talk about the smaller things we can do to make our own environments and organizations better, kinder, and more effective on a micro scale, and build up the immunity to make the changes we need on a macro scale.
A big part of how I approach organizational work is asking: how can we create an environment that our teams and our colleagues would also want to live in? One we’d want to see our children and families live in?
“We didn’t call it ‘social media.’ It was ‘community.’”
Caterina Fake: My background is in product design. I was a co-founder of Flickr, as well as the chairman of Etsy. Flickr came of age during a techno-utopian era. It was a very different era of technology development, and things took a very different course subsequently. A lot of the basic principles like owning your own data were actually foundational principles of many of the originating teams who were building social software back in the day.
We didn’t call it, interestingly, ‘social media.’ That was a later moniker. It was called ‘online community.’ And that was a very different thing. Building an online community meant that you were actively participating in it. It meant that you were subjecting yourself to shared mores common to the group of people that you were interacting with. Social media assumes that there’s a container in which you put things, and there’s a sort of passive audience. Online communities are a completely different idea.
“Can you build kindness into software? Yes.”
The small incremental changes that Matt talked about, and how they can lead to tremendous change—I’ve seen them. When you build software, you make a tiny little change, and then suddenly people behave in a different way.
I was giving a talk at MoMA recently, and there was a question from the audience: Can you build kindness into software? And my answer was: yes, this is actually something you can do. You can engineer people’s behavior using software, and it doesn’t have to go the way it has gone now. It could have gone a completely different way, and it still can go a completely different way.
Giorgos Tsetis: I’m the co-founder and chairman of Nutrafol, a hair wellness brand that supports people with hair loss and thinning hair. Nutrafol started as a men’s brand, but it turned into a women’s brand over time because there was such a demand and need for it.
The experience has been really phenomenal personally for me because I was able to be a part of helping millions of people feel a little bit better about themselves. Hair loss, unfortunately, is still a taboo. There are a lot of misconceptions around hair loss, and we were able to slightly shift that conversation.
That’s what personally drives me—helping people at scale with amazing products and services. In 2022, Nutrafol was acquired by Unilever, which is a large conglomerate. Suddenly you’re part of a larger organization, and when it comes to leadership, things absolutely change.
But in any setting, the world is about connections and partnerships, and trust is really important, and it’s hard to build a tremendous amount of trust if you’re not authentic. That belief continues to be a driving force for me.
Christine Choi: Let’s stay with you Giorgos. You and I met on a flight, aboard a tiny little propeller plane. We were flying in very choppy conditions. We were on the opposite ends of the aisle, and you leaned over and said, “I’m scared of flying.” And we had a conversation about your engineering background.
You’ve had incredible success. And yet you’re still the same person. You have consistently shown up as a kind friend, leader, and as someone who has created compassion for a condition that people find shameful and embarrassing.
So I really appreciate what you’ve been able to do. It requires extensive collaboration among people who are incentivized differently. You have brand experts and you have the consumer. And you also face a heavily regulated environment. How did you go about creating cohesion and collaboration among such different organizations?
Giorgos Tsetis: I’m way more interested in people who will stick by you when things get hard or when you experience serious turbulence. So we built a culture of people who truly, deeply care for others. Not just for the customer, but also for each other. Because, especially in large companies, it’s so important for that work life to be a pleasant experience because that’s someone’s daily life.
“We modeled the behavior we wanted to see.”
Caterina Fake: I’ve, too, been very blessed with an amazing team that champions that every day.
Flickr was my first experience of sharing my photos with the outside world and connecting with people I didn't know. And I felt very safe there.
We engineered community and generosity in unusual ways that didn’t exist prior. We started in December 2003, and it was one of the originating web 2.0 businesses. My co-founders and I came from a background in online community, as I’ve said before, and this was a completely different mindset. It was very collaborative. Very interactive.
And if we look back to see how we created this humane, civilized, and thriving community, it was because there were originally only six members on the team, and yet each one of us was posting about 50 times a day. We were modeling the behavior that we wanted to see on the platform.
In retrospect, we were trying to create an environment in which people were deliberately and actively interacting with the photos. We were commenting on all of the photos that were being uploaded. We were connecting people. There were four Norwegians on the platform, and we thought, ‘Let’s introduce you all to each other!’ We were very actively doing this, in the comments, in the forums.
“Behind the software was a human backend.”
The other thing that I think was different from all of the platforms that you see today, is that our admin backend, the interactions that you didn’t see, was just as big, if not bigger than the front-facing software.
We were building and cultivating a community. We were very actively greeting people who were new on the platform. We were constantly present, and that kind of constant presence on a social platform is transformational. But if you remove people from that, if you think of it as social media and not as an online community, you get what we have today.
A thing that also made us stand out was that people were paying for the platform. This went away eventually when Flickr was acquired by Yahoo. I think it was like $3, but users were paying a very small amount in order to participate in the platform. That was very different from today’s model—selling ads against your attention.
“When the feed changed, so did the Internet.”
At Flickr, we had what we called “recent activity”—the first kind of reverse chronological activity feed. And I remember the day Facebook changed their feed so that it promoted and prioritized things that got more attention, and we saw the change instantly. When the feed changed, so did the Internet.
Because once you prioritize attention over everything else, this is what you get—sensationalism, divisiveness, pornography, and everything designed just to grab clicks. Now, in 2025, we’re living in that world.
Christine Choi: Matt, you and I both started at M13 around the same time, and our belief was that we could build enduring, meaningful startups and leadership. We encouraged founders to think beyond quickly hiring people, which can result in cancerous growth.
And you looked at it from the point of view of: How do you design an organization to enable best practices and good behavior? Could you talk about that?
Matt Hoffman: It’s a great question. I think it actually speaks to a bigger theme of how to build a community within your organization, your customer base, and the broader world.
If you think about kindness capitalism, it seems like a dichotomy. But it’s actually a continuum.
“Stop forcing people into the wrong roles or cultural molds.”
There’s a trending topic at the political level that you have to treat your workers or employees as terribly as possible. The worse you treat them, the better your financial outcomes will be. And that’s just a completely false premise.
It’s not a competition between conflicting beliefs. In fact, if you can create an environment where people feel seen, included, and psychologically safe, you will actually get better performance.
You want to build an environment people want to stay in over time. It’s actually quite expensive to replace people. And it’s really expensive when people are disengaged and don’t do their best work. They’re not the kind of people who build passionate customer relationships.
It’s very shortsighted. If you’re a billionaire, you could probably do that. But for the rest of us who are trying to build sustainable businesses and communities over time, the best way to do that is to create a larger pie for everyone you work with.
When we’re talking with founders that we work with, a lot of VCs may say: Hire fast, fire fast. That might work in the short term—you get people in fast, and you churn them out just as quickly. But we are actually in this for the long term. And if you want to create real, lasting value over time, then you should figure out why someone wants to be part of your team. Stop forcing people into the wrong roles or cultural molds.
So a lot of the conversations we are having are: How do you tell a story when you’re hiring people? It’s not just, ‘you’re lucky to have a job,’ but really figuring out where they’ll be most successful—and building around that. It’s slower in the beginning, but it’s actually faster and more efficient over time because you get the right person doing the job, and they stay loyal and grow with you.
That type of mindset—long-term abundance over scarcity thinking—makes a difference in the health, growth, and sustainability of a company.
Kindness is about clarity. It’s about setting the right expectations. It’s about making sure people have room to make decisions, even if it burns you.
Christine Choi: Exactly. Kindness is about the alignment between internal values and external outcomes.
Giorgos, how did you connect being true to yourself—your inner core and values—with the externalities and expectations of being a leader?
“If the foundation isn’t kind, it’s unstable.”
Giorgos Tsetis: I think it’s essential to stick to your core values. It starts with yourself. We addressed a very personal issue. We believed that we could make a difference. And then it was about finding the right people and persisting.
We have been leading with that philosophy. I was working with people. We were doing things together. These things make a difference, because it empowers people to be themselves and feel psychologically safe.
Without that foundation everything is incredibly unstable. It’s just not sustainable. You’re not even solving a short-term issue. It’s just a downward spiral from there.
I believe that the future of leadership is kindness.
Christine Choi: You reminded me of something: Organizations have the power to create regenerative change. My first job, as a college senior, was joining the founding team of Teach for America. At the time, there was a recession. There were no jobs. There were no opportunities. And in this environment of scarcity, I was embedded in an organization that was committed to effecting very difficult societal change within underestimated communities. And I think it rewired my brain to expect work and jobs to put me in places where I would get to work with smart people solving hard problems.
Caterina, I see you doing that now as an investor in early-stage companies. Do you have any advice for entrepreneurs and tech founders who are maybe swimming upstream and who are trying to build things more thoughtfully—for all stakeholders, not just shareholders?
“The potential is always there to build humane companies.”
Caterina Fake: The potential is always there to build humane companies. A lot of it comes down to having the right investors. Your investors, founders, team, product, and community should all reflect the vision you hold.
For example, at Etsy, the engineering department was mostly white dudes. But this was Etsy, and our customers were mostly women. This was not the engineering department that we wanted or needed.
Everybody was complaining that there were no women applying for our engineering jobs. So what we decided to do was build an engineering bootcamp. We decided to bring in the people who weren’t applying—train them, and build a community of women engineers.
The result of this entire effort was that we had an actual engineering department that looked like the future. It all started with small, incremental changes. These things are changeable.
That doesn’t mean that businesses don’t make wrong hiring decisions. But how you hire makes a difference—the simple act of looking at people as human beings and not as replaceable cogs goes a long way.
That mindset creates real value for an organization. The customers and the people that you’re talking to create a better community, ultimately creating a greater society.
Christine Choi: Kindness is hard, but it’s possible. We’re going to end here. I’ll leave you with a quote by Henry James:
“There are three things in human life that are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”
Thank you.
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