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- Corporate law in the US really mandates directors to have the duty to just maximize profit by any means, shifting the role of business to be more about just maximizing shareholder value. And so whether you do have a very strong mission statement, really, you need to make decisions based on the best interest of your investors.

There really is no way for us as a customer to really see the difference between a good company and just good marketing. And so we created a company-level certification called B Corp, returning back to where it began of allowing a director to consider more than just profit.

- Capitalism and the way that businesses run right now are a human construct. It's that way because we decided it would be that way. Just being a B Corp, just involving yourself in this space and in this community, you're changing the direction of the way businesses operate.

- There is a lot of negative feelings about capitalism right now. Capitalism, it's kind of this really powerful engine for innovation, for organizing people. The question is, how do we protect ourselves from capitalism while deriving the benefits of it?

CHRIS COHEN: In order to achieve B Corp certification, a company has to meet a variety of goals and benchmarks in areas, including how they treat their workers, how they control their environmental impacts, and how they work with underserved communities. Really, any sort of for-profit business structure, LLC, corporation, are able to achieve B Corp certification. It's a really great way to formalize and make those principles into the foundational legal documents of that company.

- Patagonia, since its beginning in 1973, has been committed to environmental protection. We helped the founders of the B Corp movement develop their certification tool. For a new company, it can be a guide for how to set up a company, not just to deliver value to the shareholders, but for benefit to society and environmental protection.

- It's almost like a checklist for us to say, well, how serious are you about being a socially responsible company? From a business perspective, we cannot prosper unless the whole society prospers.

- We knew this was going to be a challenging endeavor to try and rally all these companies together to get people to do assessments, to gradually start changing the laws of the land. And one of the things that we've been really passionate about is demonstrating that that is not only possible, but it's incredibly lucrative and it's incredibly fun.

- As a small business, you come up against a lot of challenges. Doing things the right way might cost a little more. Knowing that you have the structure of B Corp behind you to keep you on the right path, we're able to answer questions before we even knew to ask them. Burea was founded by ocean minded people. We're all surfers. Everywhere we were traveling, we were seeing plastic pollution. We came up with the idea that we were going to collect plastic, recycle it, and make a product out of it.

- We're very grounded in a way because we make things. We make soap. That's a very humble daily item that we all use, but whatever you do, I think you can make it in a way where all the relationships are just and fair.

CHRIS MANN: Yerba mate natively grows in the rainforest, but commercially, people have pulled it out of the forest. So our whole vision was about bringing it back to the forest where it natively grows, being able to partner with forest communities and then have this amazing product. It's really this virtuous cycle. It's like the more that we can share mate and get it out there, the more we can build and restore and renew.

- If governments won't do it, businesses can organize and become B Corp and raise awareness in a way that governments can't.

- Success here would be everybody being a B Corp because every consumer of a product or a service on planet Earth knows what a B Corp is and want to only support B Corp companies. Wouldn't that then incentivize the boards of directors of big multinational companies to become B Corps? That's what we want the world to look like.

ANDY FYFE: Now we're looking at close to 2,000 certified B Corps operating across 50 countries, representing over 130 different industries. We now have over 100 different versions of our assessment based on where the company is, how big it is, and what industry is in. What we hope is that, then, that redefines success, and so that all companies compete not just to be the best in the world, but the best for the world.

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