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"This is a huge challenge for successful founders: how does one ensure that a company's culture and values don't degrade long after the original team is gone?"

More than just a founder problem. This has been a defining problem for empires throughout history: how to make sure the next guy doesn't mess it up.

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Kind of a tangent but this point has really been demonstrated to me by the game Crusader Kings 2. Where I'm trying to carve out a huge empire, only to have my guy die and my heirs divide up the land and mess things up. It ends up being really hard to have the empire continue as a whole.

In another way I'm also reminded by the family companies (hotels?) in Japan that have been going for a thousand years, where they adopt grown people into the family to continue the family business.

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