Every founder I know is underwater. So we weren't sure if founders would give us a full day at EDGES 2025. More than 100 founders showed up. And engaged with each other.

We know the opportunity cost of time away from your teams. Why did they come?

The old playbooks don't work anymore.

These founders are deploying AI in health, assurance, robotics, direct to consumer, fintech, and more. They operate in a world where customers ask harder questions. Where one bad headline can end you. The ground is shifting. The founders who realize this now are ahead of the curve.

Founders will scale through chaos and complexity by using responsible innovation as a moat. Not compliance overhead. Matt Rogers built Nest and is now tackling food waste at Mill. Brad Porter scaled Amazon's robotics division and is now building AI powered collaborative robots at Cobot. They are ambitious founders. They are moving fast. They know responsible innovation isn't about perfection. It is about anticipating challenges and earning trustworthiness. That's how you win.

I was struck by the intellectual humility of the founders in the room at EDGES. These are extremely ambitious people taking on big pieces of business. Multiple founders asked versions of the same questions. How do I anticipate consequences in good faith? How can we avoid cleaning up messes and rotten culture that burns money and time? Good answers to these questions compound.

Three things became clear. First, responsible innovation shows up differently depending on stage and sector. It's not performative or reductive or a checklist. Second, high performing teams encode founder values in the earliest days of culture building. Individual founder responsibility is an essential start, but more intention is required to embed one person's values into a fast scaling startup. Third, the founders figuring this out want to help others do the same. This last part matters most. We're building this together because no one founder can build it alone.

This is why Responsible Innovation Labs exists. No single startup can build this alone: shared knowledge on what responsible innovation means, collective policy voice so startups aren't drowned out by Big Tech, peer networks that make the journey less lonely. We're building this as open infrastructure, accessible to any startup that wants to build responsibly. We're creating content, case studies, and workshops. Bridging to policy makers and civil society. Looking around corners to help founders make smarter decisions, faster.

Responsible innovation is still countercultural, but the ground is shifting. Serious founders see it. Enterprise customers care about trustworthiness. The general public is down on tech. This may be due to Big Tech, but it's every startup's problem now. Here's what matters: people want tech that makes their lives better, not worse. That creates opportunity, not just extracts value. In an era of AI emergence, geopolitical fracture, and widening inequality, old playbooks don't help much.

Great founders are updating their approach for what's ahead. Not copying prior cycles of innovation.

The infrastructure is incomplete. The norms haven't fully shifted. But we're building this together, and the companies that emerge from this community will help define what the new normal looks like for scaling startups into enduring businesses.

Thank you to everyone who brought real problems and real answers to the room. To Brad, Matt, Beth, Paul, Lan, Ho, Fern, Nick, Cal, Maulik, Lila, Ernestine, Dave, Baron, Jama, Brian, Afua, George, Diede, Laura, Roy, Christina, Melody, Rayan, and the dozens of other startup builders and investors who shared what's working and what's not. EDGES wasn't about taking time away from building. It was about building for the long term.

We're just getting started. We invite founders to join us who feel in their bones that this new era requires new building modes.