There is a phrase we hold close when we build: build the temple, never the tribunal. It is about the most unglamorous document in any company, the one almost no one reads carefully until it is too late, the founding agreement. And I have come to believe that how you write that document quietly determines what kind of institution you become.

Most founding documents, the partnership deeds and shareholder agreements that sit under a company, are written defensively. Read one closely and you can feel the assumption underneath it: that the people signing will eventually turn on each other. The document anticipates betrayal. It allocates blame in advance. It arms each party for the dispute it assumes is coming. It is, in essence, built for the worst day, the day it all goes wrong, and every clause is a weapon staged for that day.

I understand the instinct. The world has plenty of partnerships that collapsed into bitter fights, and lawyers are paid to protect against exactly that. But I have come to think this defensive posture is quietly corrosive, because a document built for war subtly prepares its signers for war. When your founding agreement treats your partners as future adversaries, it shapes how you see them from the very first day. You have built a tribunal, a machinery of dispute, and then you are surprised when disputes arrive to use it.

There is another way to build, and it starts from the opposite assumption. What if the founding document assumed shared purpose rather than coming conflict? What if it was written not to arm the parties against each other, but to hold them to a common mission? What if it was designed for the day things go right, and built to keep them going right, rather than staged for the day they fall apart?

This is what we mean by building the temple rather than the tribunal, and it is not sentimentality. It is a deliberate design philosophy that we now bring into the founding documents of the companies we build, and it changes specific, concrete things about how those documents are written.

The clearest example is how decisions get made. A defensive document is obsessed with voting: who has how many votes, who can outvote whom, how a majority can force its will on a minority. It reads like a machine for winning contests, because it assumes contests are the natural state of things. We advocate instead for consensus-first decision-making. The founding documents we help write are built so that the parties are required, first, to genuinely try to reach agreement together, to sit with a hard question until they find an answer they can share. Voting and majority power exist as a genuine last resort, a backstop for the rare case where consensus truly cannot be reached, not as the everyday mechanism of control.

This sounds like a small procedural detail. It is not. It changes the entire character of how a company is run. When the default is "we must find an answer we both believe in," people behave differently than when the default is "whoever has the votes wins." Consensus-first design forces the harder, better conversation. It treats disagreement as a problem to be genuinely worked through rather than a contest to be won on numbers. And over the life of a company, that difference compounds into two completely different cultures: one of shared stewardship, or one of perpetual factional manoeuvring.

Now I have to be honest about the real objection, because it is a serious one and I would not trust this argument without it. Documents built on trust are more fragile when trust fails. A defensive agreement, for all its cold assumptions, protects you against the worst partner, the one who genuinely turns predatory. A consensus-first, trust-based document assumes you chose your partners well, and if you chose badly, it offers less protection when things go wrong. This is a real bet, and I will not pretend it is costless.

But here is why we take that bet deliberately. The defensive document does protect you against the bad partner, but it does so at the cost of subtly poisoning the relationship with the good one. It buys insurance against betrayal by treating everyone as a probable traitor from day one. We have decided that the better investment is at the front end: choose your partners with enormous care, align genuinely and deeply on mission before you ever sign, and then write a document that reflects and reinforces that alignment rather than one that quietly braces for its collapse. Get the choosing right, and the trust-based document becomes a source of strength. Get it wrong, and no document, however defensive, truly saves you anyway. A predatory partner with a clever lawyer will find the gaps in even the most armoured agreement. The protection was always partly an illusion.

So we would rather build the temple. We would rather write founding documents that call people toward shared purpose, that make consensus the discipline and conflict the rare exception, that assume the best of the partnership while doing the hard front-end work to make that assumption sound. It is a philosophy of stewardship rather than suspicion, and we bring it into every company we help create.

The document you write at the beginning is a statement of what you believe about the people you are building with. Write it as a tribunal, and you have told them you expect a fight. Write it as a temple, and you have told them you expect to build something together, and asked them to hold themselves to that. I know which document I would rather sign, and which kind of institution it tends to produce.