3DN Trust
Trust
- Trust is an interesting issue. As a lawyer, I recommend trusting your business partners but get it in writing. In my experience, trust is easy so long as a project is going well and everyone involved is doing well. When a project is not doing well, people become more interested in protecting their own interests than in the success of the project.
- My own thinking along those lines is that it is necessary to align the interests of everyone involved. It should be structured so that, if the project succeeds, everyone benefits and, if the project fails, no one benefits.
- That is not the typical business structure we use. Typically there will be lenders, investors, managers and employees, all with different interests. At some level of success, all the parties are still interested in the success of the project. At some lesser level, there is a risk that one or more of the parties will take steps to protect their individual interests at the expense of the project's success.
- This takes us back to the issue of greed. A person in a position of power with regard to a project might intellectually understand that success would have greater overall benefit to the participants and still destroy the project if that would make them personally wealthy.
- The only sure way to align all the interests, is to start with a group of people with nothing to lose and bootstrap the project. I am sure it can be done other ways but that will involve issues of trust and greed.
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