The Purpose of Business | With Finny Kuruvilla

by Finny Kuruvilla

Finny Kuruvilla shares how Christians should view and evaluate businesses.

August 24, 2022

Transcript

Tim Weinold:

What do you think is the role business and investing are meant to play if done appropriately and well, in terms of human flourishing?

Finny Kuruvilla, MD, PhD:

I was just listening to a podcast the other day, and the person was describing life in 1895 in America. And I walked away from that podcast, thinking life was miserable for people in that time period. I mean, just so many things that we take for granted today. Something as simple as a refrigerator today. Imagine life without a refrigerator. We take it for granted, but the concept of a needle with a bore in the middle of it. Some people have said that was the invention that has cured the most number of lives in history, just that little innovation that some company figured out how to do.

Finny Kuruvilla, MD, PhD:

It is amazing to think about this level of change that we have experienced and how much better our lives are. Why? What is the basis for this? It is of course, the collective work of millions and millions of people through primarily the realm of business accumulating over the centuries, over the decades to produce the kind of quality of life that we have today. And I think this is one of the greatest confusions that has caused many people in the church today to not really understand what business is all about. We’ll sometimes ask out loud, “What’s the purpose of business?” The most common answer that we still get is, “To make money.” They still get that. And they’ve confused the purpose of the business with the means of sustaining the business. And so for that reason, we strongly advocate that the purpose of business is to serve its stakeholders, to serve its customers, its employees, et cetera. That is the purpose of the business and the capital no doubt is important. We analyze that. We want to see that there’s good health there, but it’s not really what the business should primarily be aimed at.

Category: Investing, Love of Neighbor

Author

Finny Kuruvilla

Co-Chief Investment Officer & Founding Member, Eventide Asset Management

Finny Kuruvilla, MD, PhD, serves as a Co-Chief Investment Officer, Senior Portfolio Manager for Eventide’s mid-cap growth and healthcare & life sciences strategies, including the Eventide Gilead Fund and the Eventide Healthcare and Life Sciences Fund, a Managing Director for Eventide’s private fund, as well as Founding Member of Eventide. Dr. Kuruvilla has a background in healthcare, statistics, and investing. Concurrent with his early years at Eventide, he was a Principal at Clarus Ventures, a healthcare and life sciences venture capital firm subsequently acquired by Blackstone. Earlier in his career, Dr. Kuruvilla was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, where he led the development of a new microarray between the Broad Institute and a publicly-traded company Affymetrix. Prior to his investing career, Dr. Kuruvilla was resident, chief resident, and fellow at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Kuruvilla holds an MD from Harvard Medical School, a PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from Harvard University, a SM in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a BS in Chemistry from Caltech.