The panel argues that strong business relationships shouldn't depend entirely on personal trust. The stronger structure is alignment: create incentives where both parties benefit when the venture succeeds and both have something meaningful to lose when it fails. Incentive alignment is a well-established concept in economics and management. Principal-agent theory examines what happens when parties have different objectives and how compensation, ownership, monitoring and contracts can bring their interests closer together. Alignment matters because people naturally respond to the incentives surrounding them. Harvard Business Review notes that carefully designed compensation can align behavior with company strategy, while poorly designed incentives can produce misaligned objectives and weak results.