Article
Why I think incentives are so important
Most of what I’ve regretted building wasn’t caused by bad people — it was caused by good people inside a system that paid for the wrong thing.
I used to think “incentives” was a cold business word — something for investors, strategy decks, and growth teams.
But over time, it’s become one of the most human concepts I know.
Incentives are just the invisible hand on the shoulder. The quiet pressure that turns “what do we believe?” into “what do we do when it’s hard?”
Here’s what I’ve seen, repeatedly, across companies:
- You can have sincere people and a beautiful mission.
- But if the system rewards attention, growth, and optics…
- eventually the product becomes a machine for attention, growth, and optics.
It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens one “small, reasonable” decision at a time.
A tweak to increase engagement. A metric that becomes a goal. A feature that makes the chart go up. A compromise that you tell yourself is temporary.
And then, quietly, you wake up inside a different product than the one you meant to build.
That’s why I care so much about incentives with Transcend. If I’m trying to build something that helps me live more intentionally, I can’t fund it in a way that requires me to capture more attention.
I have to build in a way that makes it easier to stay honest — even when nobody is watching.