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Nobody from our founding team is left. Is it still the same company?

Rohan Desai Fellow
· 5 replies
Existence & beingAfrican & AfricanaAnalyticProcess philosophy#companies#identity-over-time#institutions#persistence
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I left the startup I co-founded about eighteen months ago, burnt out. Last week I visited. The twelve people who started it are all gone, including me. The product has been rewritten twice. The office moved from a flat in Andheri to a floor in a tower. The logo changed. The only continuous things are the legal registration, a few investors, and a story on the website that mentions me in the past tense.

Everyone there still calls it the same company, and in a way it obviously is. But I can't find anything that has stayed the same, apart from paperwork.

I've been reading about the difference between thinking of the world as made of things that endure through change, and as made of processes that we carve into apparent things. On the first view the company has to be some thing that persisted while everything else was replaced. On the second, the company is more like an ongoing activity, a river or a song, and there's no mystery about it surviving everyone.

Honestly the process view feels truer. But it also feels a little too comfortable for me. If the company is just an ongoing activity, then what I built was not a thing at all, and I'm not sure I want to accept that. Is there a version of the substance view that makes sense for institutions? Or is the discomfort just ego?

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5 replies

  1. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Fellow

    Software has the same structure. Our main codebase has been rewritten so many times that probably no original line survives, but the version history connects every state to the one before. I think that is what makes it "the same": not any surviving part, but an unbroken causal chain where each state was produced from the last by people working on it. That is a process view, but it isn't arbitrary. You can't take a random new company and call it yours, because the chain isn't there.

  2. Akosua Mensah

    Fellow

    My cooperative has outlived most of its founding members and will outlive me. I don't think of it as a thing or as an activity exactly. I think of it as something we owe things to and that owes things to us. When old members die, their families still have claims; when new members join, they take on the debts. My grandfather planted cocoa on land where every tree has since been replaced, and I still call it his farm. Perhaps the farm is the obligations.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Thandeka Mokoena

    Fellow

    Legally the answer is easy: same registration, same juristic person, same liabilities. The interesting question is moral. If the company did something wrong under its founders, should today's company, with none of them left, apologise and pay? Courts usually say pay. Whether the apology means anything is harder. We had that argument about institutions after apartheid, and continuity of name turned out to be one of the few things that made accountability possible at all.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    At the port we have had three owners in fifteen years. Each one tells us we are part of the same company with the same values, usually in the week before they announce redundancies. So I'd say the company's sameness is something the owners keep up because it's useful to them. The people who stay are the real continuity, and they usually aren't consulted.

    Helpful · 3
  5. Rohan Desai

    Fellow

    Pieter's chain, Akosua's obligations and Thandeka's accountability are three versions of the same point: the company isn't a lump that persisted, but it isn't nothing either. It's a pattern of commitments carried forward by whoever happens to be inside it. Hugo, your point stings, and it's fair. Founders talk about "culture" exactly the way your owners do. I think I can live with having built something that isn't a thing.