#mission-lock

A mission lock removes the incentive to overstate impact, not the ability. Self-reported figures — profit percentages, trees planted, emissions — can mislead without independent verification, and genuine purpose locks can actually make weak measurement harder to spot.

Steward-ownership locks where profit goes, not whether it exists. When revenue depends on a platform the organisation doesn't control — an ad network, a search index, a card scheme — mission funding is exposed to terms set by others.

An ownership lock only prevents sale and profit extraction — it cannot make remaining stewards competent or mission-faithful. A locked company can still stagnate, drift in purpose, entrench insiders, or make unverified impact claims. The lock is necessary but not sufficient.

The features that make a mission lock strong — no profitable exit, no outside control, no dividend extraction — also remove the entire return mechanism conventional equity relies on. Locked companies must grow on cash flow, debt, or mission-aligned capital, which strains capital-

A company founded for social or environmental purposes is structurally fragile: founders age out, investors demand returns, and acquirers can buy the mission away. Without a binding ownership structure, purpose is the first thing cut when money or control changes hands.

Run a consumer service (e.g. ad-funded web search) at a profit, ring-fence the surplus for vetted reforestation partners, and lock the pledge into a mission-protected ownership structure so it can't be quietly cut during downturns or ownership changes.

Embed the cause inside a product people already use daily (a search engine, a current account, a consumer good) and route its profits to the mission. Impact then grows with ordinary adoption and ad/transaction revenue, not with donor cycles or grant rounds.

Get certified against a published social/environmental standard (e.g. B Corp) as a public, audited signal of commitment. Cheap, requires no ownership change, useful as a complement — but it locks nothing: it's voluntary, revocable, and the first thing dropped when it conflicts wi

Ecosia (Berlin, founded 2009) earns ad-click revenue from search results syndicated via Bing/Microsoft and Google, and channels its surplus into reforestation by paying local planting and restoration partner NGOs across…

Freetree was Ecosia's browser extension that monetised online shopping via affiliate commissions (revenue paid by merchants for referred sales) and channelled proceeds into Ecosia's tree-planting programme. Launched in…

Etsy was certified by B Lab as a B Corporation from 2012. After its 2015 IPO, retaining certification required converting its Delaware C-corporation legal form to a public benefit corporation (PBC) by a 2017 deadline. U…