If you've spent any time in founder circles, you know the default playbook by heart. Find a hot category. Raise money — because the raise is the signal of success, not the business itself. Push hard toward an exit. Growth at all costs, then figure out what you actually built.
For a long time, that was the story. And for a lot of people, it still is.
I've never been wired that way. Not because I'm a contrarian or someone who throws out the rulebook on principle — I'm actually pretty conventional in how I operate. I follow the expected path. I just spend a lot of time questioning whether the path makes sense, whether there's a better route, and whether the destination everyone's racing toward is actually the one worth reaching.
I watched the second wave of mission-driven brands take off after 2008 and felt the pull of it — the energy, the fundraising rounds that made headlines, the founders who seemed to be playing a completely different game. I interviewed at some of those companies. Asked questions about strategy and got blank stares. Raised the idea of taking a longer view and was told, more than once, that I didn’t have the chops for that kind of growth. That's a particular kind of dismissal that sticks with you.
So when a trusted advisor handed me Another Way — David Whorton's articulation of what he calls the Evergreen 7Ps — it wasn't a revelation so much as a recognition. Someone had finally named what a lot of serious, intentional founders have been doing all along, without much of a framework to point to.
The Assumed Default
Here's what I've watched happen repeatedly, in boardrooms and pitch decks and advisory conversations: success gets defined by what's most visible. And what's most visible in the business press tends to be the VC-backed, hypergrowth, headline-making version of building a company.
That version is real. It works for some people. But it is one path — not the path — and the business world has a habit of presenting it as the only logical destination for any ambitious founder.
The cost of that assumption is significant. Founders who aren't wired for that model start to wonder what's wrong with them. Teams get pulled toward tactics that don't fit the business they're actually building. And good companies drift away from what made them work in the first place, chasing a version of success that was never really theirs.
What Whorton Got Right
Another Way opens with the story of Silicon Valley — how a particular model of building companies became the dominant cultural narrative — and then makes the case that there has always been another way. Not a lesser way. Not a slower way. A different, and often more durable, way.
His framework, the Evergreen 7Ps, describes the principles that define companies built for longevity rather than exit:
- Purpose — a compelling reason for existing that sits above everything else, including the bottom line.
- Perseverance — the ambition and resilience to keep pursuing that purpose when it gets hard, which it will.
- People First — the belief that taking care of your team is how you take care of everyone else.
- Private — the structural advantage of staying closely held: longer view, less noise, more flexibility.
- Profit — not the purpose, but the clearest signal that you're actually delivering value to customers.
- Paced Growth — the discipline to grow steadily and consistently instead of chasing the spike.
- Pragmatic Innovation — continuous improvement built on calculated, capital-efficient risk, not moonshots.
The companies he holds up aren't the darlings of the mission-driven startup world. They're businesses like Wegmans and Meijer — family-owned, privately held, quietly excellent for decades. The kind of companies that don't get many magazine covers because their success doesn't fit the narrative that gets clicks. They just keep building good businesses and taking care of their people. Apparently, that's not a great pitch.
The Takeaway That Matters
This isn't a book about slowing down or playing it safe. It's a book about being intentional. About building a company that reflects what you actually believe, rather than defaulting to the model that gets the most attention.
If you've spent any time feeling like the conventional playbook doesn't quite fit — not because you're risk-averse or not ambitious enough, but because something about it has always felt slightly off — this one is worth your time.
You probably already knew there was another way. Thornton just gives you the language for it.
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See you in two weeks,
Kathryn
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