 Greg and I have been looking forward to this conversation so I think we'll just jump right in. As I do, I'd like to just give a little bit of grounding about I think why we're here and hopefully why you all are here as well. And a little bit about why we have B Corps and Benefit Corporations and now Perpetual Purpose Trusts. These are all examples of alternative forms of corporate governance and ownership. And so I think the question that we want to discuss today a bit is what are we trying to solve for? So I'm going to give you a little bit of just quick history on B Lab and Benefit Corporations and then have some questions for you too, Greg. So for those who don't know, 17 years ago, B Lab's founders embarked on a mission to really change the way that business was done and to transition to a place where business could be a force for good. And so the reason for this was that too often we all know this. I think this is why we're all here. Business as usual often would enrich the few while exploiting workers, exploiting communities of the planet itself. And so they recognized this profit at all cost incentive was not really adding up to the world we wanted to be building. And this was also built into corporate law in the form of shareholder primacy, which of course stipulates that the duty of corporate directors is to maximize profit for shareholders. And that's a really important distinction. So in order to harness this powerful engine of the private sector to address global crises, which of course we all know includes the climate crisis, racial and gender inequity, increasing inequality around the board. They recognized that business would need a new corporate governance model. And so that model became known as the benefit corporation. So B Lab, along with early adopters in this community, including Patagonia, approached state legislatures and proposed this adoption of a statute that would allow corporations to amend their governance documents to make them responsible for a specific public benefit and to require that directors and managers of benefit corporations really take into consideration their impacts on workers, on communities, on the planet. And so in short, benefit corporation legislation really looked to replace this practice of shareholder primacy, instead with the principles of stakeholder governance. And so since then, benefit corporate legislation has been adopted by more than 40 US states in this country, and then 10 additional countries around the world. And actually, in fact, Yvonne Shanard, Patagonia's founder, helped advocate for passage of that legislation right here in California. So today we now have more than 15,000 benefit corporations across the world. And so I'm joined on stage today by Greg, executive director of the Hold Fast Collective. And Greg and the rest of the Patagonia leadership team are really modeling the kind of purpose-driven innovation that we really need from the private sector. And we at B Lab are really proud to count Patagonia as one of the staunchest and earliest members of the B Corp community. So, Greg, I'd love if you would share a little bit about the process you all went through to establish Patagonia's Perpetual Purpose Trust. Even as you continued to certify as a B Corp and to stay a part of the B Corp community, could you share a bit about that process and what has this evolution in your ownership structure enabled you to do for people on the planet? Great. There's a famous picture, by the way, of when Patagonia converted to a benefit corp in California in 2012 where he actually wore a tie and a jacket to go to the State Department in California. So that's kind of rolling around campus in some places. You'll never see him in a tie again. But our process was, it was a long time in the making, 50-year-old company, we'd been on this journey. Yvonne had been on this journey around making the best product. He knew how, being really selective in, from a quality perspective, how the product was made, the materials that went into the product, that was always really core, as a mountain climber, sort of the quality was your life really dependent on a lot of those criteria. And so, it was really important to him. And through the course of the history of the business, we started making other decisions that were also really important. On-site childcare is a critical. If you've ever visited our campus in Ventura, there's a bunch of children running around screaming, which provides a lot of nice context for what's really important in life. And some of our leadership over the years actually graduated from that school, which is really, really wonderful. We had an earth tax through the 1980s that we started programmatically following through on that became the 1% for the planet standard for grant making. And in the 90s, Yvonne had a friend, Doug Tompkins, who'd sold his company or his stake in his company Esprit and had gone off and engaged in a lot of philanthropic world that was really exciting to him. And he, Doug recommended that he do the same thing with Patagonia. And it kind of was this existential question for Yvonne and the family around, why are we in business? What's really important to us? And they decided on the heels of this sort of important question that was posed to them, well, what is important to us is that we model a different way of doing business, a different form of capitalism, making the decisions, sometimes, oftentimes, contrarian decisions that had made them so successful over the years and started being more programmatic about how we do that work and share what we're learning and how we're doing and how successful they had been in making those decisions. And so it naturally, when movements around multi-stakeholder capitalism started building in the early aughts with groups like B-Lab and the opportunity to support the emergence of benefit corporation statutes across the country became real. It was a great opportunity for us to reflect and put down into writing all of these things, like how Yvonne makes decisions. What are the criteria that goes into his mind? Because like a lot of you business owners out there in the audience, you're operating day to day, you know how you want to make decisions, you know what's important to you. He was much the same way and it was a good opportunity, although he had written a little bit about it in some books, what's really important when we make product decisions, we may make business decisions, what do we want on the table as part of that conversation, what are those criteria so that we know that in the future when Yvonne isn't here, that we're making decisions that are aligned with his philosophy. So being a member of the B-Corp community was really important and then we started through the teens engaging in more activism and philanthropy. All of this was at risk when Yvonne said that he wanted to release more value to fight the climate crisis. The traditional way of releasing value is to sell to an investor or to sell all our part of the company. We didn't know who that individual was going to be. So and the risk that all of this would get unraveled, a new owner would decide you no longer want to be a benefit corporation, you no longer want to be certified B-Corp, all of that could come undone. And you hear a lot often when companies become certified by B-Lab and they become a 1% for the planet member, but you don't hear so much of it when they stop doing those things. And so that was really unacceptable from Yvonne's perspective. Protecting the business long term was core criteria, but how do we release value and meet this other need that he had? That's where we found the perpetual purpose trust to help control and serve as the deadbolt for governance and control permanently going forward into the future. And then we designed the whole FAST Collective to release all the value that the business created, that it didn't need to go back into the business. Great, thank you. So what I'm hearing is that benefit corpse represent one alternative model for corporate governance, perpetual purpose trust represent really an alternative ownership structure, one that to your point locks in purpose and impact in perpetuity, not at risk as there's a transition in leadership, which I think is really innovative. And we see this in the B Corp space where companies are certified and they have to go through recertification and for different reasons, they're not always successful. So really an interesting, different version of what that could look like. I'd love to hear, Greg, with this new ownership structure, why was it so important to Patagonia to continue to be a certified B Corp and benefit corporation? It was always, I mean, it was, when we had these conversations and we slowly took the family through the different options and they realized how important it was to continue to protect the business, the conversation was always around the benefit purposes that we'd articulated in becoming a certified B Corp. So that's how we measure our success. That's how we knew whether or not we were being honored, honoring our mission. And so there was never a scenario where everything that we were doing, in addition to trying to release value to fight the climate crisis, we were looking for ways to ensure that everything that made us proud of what we were as a B Corp wouldn't change. And so with the Purpose Trust structure in place, the way that it works is, so you have management operating the business day to day, they report, well, they're accountable to employees and other stakeholders. They are also directly accountable to Patagonia's board of directors. Now the board of directors are accountable no longer to individual shareholders, individual owners. They're accountable to trustees of the Patagonia Purpose Trust. What's one unique feature of Purpose Trust that really facilitates the deadbolt sort of feature of this all is there's a role called a protector or an enforcer depending on what state you're in. There's 12 states by the way that have perpetual purpose trust statutes. So the trustees of the trust are in turn accountable to the protector or enforcer. So there's multiple layers of protection. There's a lot of things that have to go wrong for Patagonia to drift off of its mission and that these overlapping layers of structural protection were the main thing that we found so attractive about the trust and the fact that it's never gonna go away. Yeah, that's great, thank you. Checks and balances, I suppose we all know about that. I think one of the things that I've heard you talk about previously today and in the past has been around the B Corp certification community and something that we hear a lot from the Patagonia's of the world but also the much smaller companies. We're a 8,000 strong movement now with representing nearly 700,000 workers around the world. And what we hear from them a lot is that one of the values beyond the certification itself is the community. And so for us our goal has always been around economic systems change. That may mean, that does in part mean building a community of B Corps. But the B Corp and Benefit Corp model along with this perpetual purpose trust model that may not be right for everyone, right? It's not a one size fits all. And I think what we're trying to chat and offer today is a couple of different looks at what this might look like to be a purpose driven business. And so I think we've given a little bit of a Cliff's Notes version of what this has looked like at each of our organizations. Where do you think we should go from here? How might folks here learn about Patagonia's journey and maybe even begin to explore whether one of these models that we've just started to touch on today whether one might be right for them. Yeah, as you said, it's been incredibly valuable for Patagonia to be a member of the B Corp community. I think there's a lot to learn. We do things a certain way. We've been around for a long time. There's a lot of innovative organizations out there, owners, entrepreneurs that are thinking about things in different ways. And so one of our benefit purposes is to share information and be transparent about what we do. In turn, as part of those conversations we learn a lot as well in terms of particularly on supply chain. I think when you get into the space where you have all the answers like you're in a really bad place. And so because that's been one of our criteria that we've evaluated ourselves it's really opened us up to learning from a lot of the members of the community. And then I think it's always good to go through a test and to be graded and rated because you can say things to yourself and you can justify things and the choices that you make. But it's really important at the end of the day because of the breadth of the certification process you go through. It's not just looking at how you make product. It's looking at how you treat employees. It's looking at how you treat customers. And so you can score really well in one area that oh I feel and this is all we ever talk about but you have to look at all these other areas too and all the corners of your business to make sure that all of these stakeholders are being honored and respected and you're making intentional choices. So it's been incredibly valuable to just see how you're stacking up and how other people are scoring as well. So it's been an important part of the process in terms of where it goes from here. I think one of the challenges for our process when Yvonne said he wanted to sell the company was that most of the options available were traditional models. A lot of the lawyers that we would go out and talk to or different advisors we would go out and talk to would, I mean, what they turn around when they're on their phone and they grab off their shelf is like, well you sell the company, you bring in another investor, you bring in outside capital. You'll have a shareholder agreement and trust me they're like-minded and trust is hard when something is as important to you as a business like Patagonia or a business that you all may own in your worlds. So we went on a journey to find different answers to problems that had been vexing the family for a long time. The answers are out there. There's different structures out there, perpetual purpose trusts. We're gonna have a session later this afternoon. Sarah and I with a friend of mine, Natalie Reitman-White, who's got a ton of experience in this. There's a lot of organizations who are looking at alternative ownership structures. There's an emerging group of advisors that are developing expertise in it and you might be surprised at the scale of some of the companies that are looking at manipulating and capping returns that go to owners too as part of some philanthropic purpose. It's a really exciting landscape. Definitely, thank you very much. So yes, please come join us at 1.30. I'm gonna wrap us up here and the last thing I do wanna say is that there is an important role for philanthropy to play in all of this. So I see some of you out there. I know there's another session later I'll be there in the audience. I think it's really important that this is not just a conversation for business leaders and impact investors, but that funders also look at ways to help us explore, design, test these new forms of corporate governance. And that's because philanthropy can invest in market leading ideas before the market is ready to support them. So there's my plug. I wouldn't be able to leave the stage without saying that. But yeah, I hear some claps, thank you. So ultimately, this will take collective action. Thank you all for being here today and we'll see you all hopefully at 1.30.