Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, Tested on 20 About Pages: 8 Start With Why, 12 With What

You have a buyer’s attention and a pitch that opens with a belief, because the Simon Sinek golden circle says people buy why you do it. We read 20 big-company About pages: eight start with a why, 12 with a what, none with a how. Start with why to sell belief, with what when the buyer has a budget.

We opened the official About or Who we are page of 20 of the largest companies in America on 6 November 2026, copied the first full sentence of body copy a visitor reads, and coded its first clause as a why, a how or a what, using Sinek’s own definitions. Every row below links to the page we read.

What We Found

Of 20 big-company About pages we read on 6 November 2026, eight open with a why, 12 with a what and none with a how, and Apple, Sinek’s own example, opens its company boilerplate with the Macintosh in 1984.

The eight whys are Microsoft, Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Tesla, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Delta and Disney. Three of them use the word “mission” in the first sentence. The 12 whats are Apple, Walmart, ExxonMobil, Costco, Nike, Starbucks, Boeing, The Home Depot, Procter & Gamble, Netflix, Ford and GE Aerospace, and six of those carry a founding year, a date or a count of years in business in the first sentence.

The how, the middle ring of the circle, the values and the method, appears in second sentences at Costco and Ford and nowhere in a first one. The model says the inside ring matters most. The pages lead with the outside ring, and nobody leads with the middle.

What Is the Simon Sinek Golden Circle?

The Simon Sinek golden circle is three rings. The inside ring is WHY, which Sinek’s own site defines as “your purpose, cause, or belief”. The middle ring is HOW, “the actions we take when we are at our natural best”. The outside ring is WHAT, the products and services. Inspiring leaders, he says, start from the inside.

The line most people remember is on the same page: “People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.” Apple is the example he uses to make it stick, which is why Apple sat in our dataset.

Where Does “Start With Why” Come From?

The phrase comes from a 2009 book and a 2009 talk. The book is Start with WHY, which Sinek’s book page dates to 2009 and describes as being “about how articulating your purpose can inspire you and those around you”. The talk is “How great leaders inspire action”, given at TEDxPuget Sound in September 2009.

The talk is the reason the model is everywhere. The TED page showed 71,364,039 plays when we checked it on 6 November 2026, for a talk that runs 17 minutes and 47 seconds. Seventeen years on it is still the reason a founder’s deck opens with a belief instead of a price.

What 20 About Pages Open With

The table holds the dataset. The sentence is the first full sentence of body copy on the page, after the navigation and the headline, and the code is for its first clause. Where a sentence runs long we show the opening clause; the full sentence is in the dataset. Apple and GE Aerospace carry a note, because neither has a page called About.

Company	Opening sentence of body copy	Code	Page
Microsoft	“Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”	WHY	About Microsoft
Amazon	“Amazon’s mission is to make customers’ lives better and easier every day by relentlessly inventing on their behalf.”	WHY	About Amazon
JPMorgan Chase	“Supporting global and local economies by delivering value for our shareholders and investing in the progress of our clients and our employees.”	WHY	About us
Tesla	“We’re building a world powered by solar energy, running on batteries and transported by electric vehicles.”	WHY	About Tesla
Coca-Cola	“The Coca-Cola Company has been refreshing the world and making a difference for 140 years.”	WHY	Company
Pfizer	“We’re in relentless pursuit of breakthroughs that change patients’ lives.”	WHY	About Pfizer
Delta Air Lines	“Everything we do creates a more connected world.”	WHY	About Delta
Disney	“The mission of The Walt Disney Company is to entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling…”	WHY	About
Apple (press-release boilerplate; no About page)	“Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984.”	WHAT	Apple Newsroom
Walmart	“Walmart today is a people-led, tech-powered omnichannel retailer dedicated to helping people save money and live better.”	WHAT	About Walmart
ExxonMobil	“With operations in more than 56 countries globally, our team of 61,000 scientists, engineers, researchers, technicians, professionals and other employees, are focused on safely meeting the world’s energy and product needs…”	WHAT	Who we are
Costco	“Costco Wholesale is a multi-billion dollar global retailer with warehouse club operations in 14 countries.”	WHAT	About Costco
Nike	“Nike’s Philip H. Knight Campus in Beaverton, Ore. opened in 1990, spans 400 acres and has more than 75 buildings, many named after the company’s marquee sponsored athletes, past and present.”	WHAT	NIKE, Inc.
Starbucks	“Our story begins in 1971 along the cobblestone streets of Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market.”	WHAT	Our Company
Boeing	“A leading global aerospace company and top U.S. exporter, Boeing develops, manufactures and services commercial airplanes, defense products and space systems for customers in more than 150 countries.”	WHAT	Our Company
The Home Depot	“When The Home Depot was founded in 1978, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank had no idea how revolutionary this new “hardware store” would be for home improvement and the retail industry.”	WHAT	About Us
Procter & Gamble	“Our brands are trusted in millions of living rooms, kitchens, laundry rooms, and bathrooms” (the sentence continues: passed down from generation to generation)	WHAT	Who we are
Netflix	“Whatever you’re into, whatever your mood, Netflix delivers the next series, films and games you’ll obsess over.”	WHAT	About Netflix
Ford	“Ford is a family company, one that spans the globe and has shared ideals.”	WHAT	About Us
GE Aerospace (Company Overview page)	“From the turbosupercharger to the world’s most powerful commercial jet engine, GE Aerospace’s history of powering the world’s aircraft features more than 100 years of innovation.”	WHAT	Company Overview

Two rows need the note. Apple has no About page: apple.com/about serves the site map, the leadership page is a list of names, and the investor page carries no sentence about the company. The nearest thing is the “About Apple” paragraph at the foot of every press release, so we took it from one dated 13 August 2026. GE Aerospace’s About us menu is a dropdown with no page of its own; the item its navigation labels Company Overview is the history page, so we read that.

Why Do So Many Big Companies Start With What?

Because the About page has a reader with a job to do. The visitor is a supplier, journalist, candidate or analyst, and the page must first say what the company is and how big. Twelve of 20 pages do that, and six of the 12 put a founding year or a count of years in the same sentence, the oldest credibility there is.

Look at who sits on each side, and be careful with it, because the split is not clean. The two car makers split: Tesla opens with the world it wants to build, Ford with what kind of company it is, and Ford’s purpose line sits two sections down. Among the companies that sell big-ticket things to professional buyers, the plane maker, the engine maker and the oil major all open with a what, and so do three of the four retailers, Walmart, Costco and The Home Depot, with Amazon the exception. A purpose sentence is the one sentence that can be true of a hundred million customers at once. A what is the sentence a buyer with a shortlist came for.

Apple is the awkward one. The TED page lists it first among Sinek’s examples, and in 2026 the company’s own self-description starts with a product and a year. The example is a company whose what was so good the why could stay unspoken.

Nike’s company page opens with the size of its campus in Oregon. A 400-acre headquarters with buildings named after athletes is a what that does the work of a why, which is the trick Sinek’s model leaves out. Our piece on leadership theories places the golden circle among the frameworks that explain this kind of pull, and our study of leadership behaviors counts the version people can see.

Golden Circle vs the Mission Line

The golden circle and the mission statement are cousins, and we measured different things. Our earlier report on the business mission statement took the mission or purpose line of the 20 largest US companies, wherever it sat on the site, and counted what each one named and left out. This article measures the first sentence a visitor reads on the About page, which the company chose to put before everything else.

A company can hold a perfectly good why in a mission line three scrolls down and still open its About page with “a multi-billion dollar global retailer with warehouse club operations in 14 countries”. Costco does. The mission line is what the company believes. The opening sentence is what the company thinks you need first, and 12 of 20 decided you need the what.

Three of the eight whys are the mission line moved to the top: Microsoft, Amazon and Disney each put the word “mission” in the first sentence. That is the cheapest way to pass Sinek’s test, and a founder can do it in an afternoon. Whether it changes a buyer’s mind is the next question.

When Should a Founder Start With Why?

Start with why when the listener is choosing whether to believe you at all: an investor at seed stage, a first hire, a partner who will carry your name, or a reader who has never heard of you. In each case the what is unproven or does not exist yet, so the belief is the only thing you can show. The eight whys in our table are all companies that can afford to assume you already know the what.

The founder’s pitch is where the Simon Sinek golden circle earns its keep, as an editor. Write the deck the way it comes out, which for most founders is what, what, what, then a slide about the team. Then ask of the first sentence: is this a belief, a method or a product? If it is a product, and the audience has not yet decided you are worth a meeting, move the belief up. That is the practical content of the model and it is worth the price of the book.

The why is also for inside the building. Tesla’s opening sentence is about the world it wants to exist; a sentence like that recruits engineers more than it sells cars. A founder choosing what to say at the all-hands after a bad quarter needs the why more than any customer does, and the weeks when a founder cannot say it out loud are the weeks our guide to burnout mindfulness is for.

Sinek is one of a set of popular authors whose frameworks our newsroom has tested against the people meant to be using them. Related reading: our check of which Tony Robbins books the published rankings put first, our test of the Robin Sharma 5 AM Club against what CEOs say they actually do at dawn, and our Let Them theory summary. In all four cases the framework turned out to be a clean editing tool and a weak description of the world.

When Should You Start With What?

Start with what when the buyer has a budget, a deadline and a shortlist. A procurement manager comparing three vendors, a CFO reading a quote, an investor comparing two funds: each has decided to buy and needs to know what yours is, what it costs and when it arrives. A why in the first line costs them time.

The clearest case is cold outreach. The reader of a cold email has given you one line, and the line that gets a reply says what you do for whom, as our breakdown of the Tim Ferriss cold email template shows. A belief in the first line of a cold email reads as a sermon from a stranger.

The same holds for any purchase where the number is the decision. An investor choosing between two index funds wants the figure our explainer on what is an expense ratio covers, and the fund house’s belief in democratised wealth can wait for the annual letter. A manager choosing a course for their team wants the price, the hours and the certificate, which is why our test of the best online learning platforms opens with those and leaves each platform’s purpose statement to the platform.

Boeing’s sentence is the model answer for this buyer. “A leading global aerospace company and top U.S. exporter, Boeing develops, manufactures and services commercial airplanes, defense products and space systems for customers in more than 150 countries.” Nothing about belief, and nothing a buyer of a plane would want moved. Our explainer on what is a business model is the longer version of that sentence: what you sell, to whom, and how the money comes back.

That buyer is running a sum in their head, and the Hormozi value equation describes it: the outcome, the odds you deliver, the time and the effort. A why speaks to none of the four terms. A clear what speaks to all of them.

How to Use the Golden Circle as an Editing Tool

Write the pitch, the About page or the email in whatever order it comes. Mark the first sentence with the code we used: belief, method or product. Then ask whether the reader has already decided to buy something in your category. If no, lead with why. If yes, lead with what, and keep the why for the second paragraph, where Costco and Ford keep their how.

None of the 20 pages opens with a how, which means the values and the method, the part of the model a buyer could check, is the part nobody leads with. If you want to stand out on a page where everybody says either “our mission is” or “founded in”, open with how you work and let the reader infer the belief. That is the one move in the dataset nobody has made.

Sequence frameworks sell because they tell you what to do first, and that is also their weakness. Dave Ramsey’s steps work because the order is the advice, as our walk through the Dave Ramsey baby steps shows, and the golden circle is a sequence framework for sentences. Where the order fits the reader it is excellent. Where it does not, the dataset says the biggest companies in the country ignore it, and so should you.

How We Did This

On 6 November 2026 our newsroom opened the official About, Who we are or Our company page of 20 large US public companies, chosen to cover technology, retail, energy, banking, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, travel, media and cars, and including the companies ranked first, second, fourth and ninth on the 2026 Fortune 500. We copied the first full sentence of body copy a visitor reads, after the navigation, the headline and any tagline, and coded its first clause as WHY (a belief, purpose, cause or mission), HOW (values, a method or a differentiator) or WHAT (products, scale, history or facts), applying the same rule to every row and coding only the first clause where a sentence mixed two. Headings and media captions were recorded but not coded. Where the About domain is a news hub (Nike, Starbucks) we used its company overview page. Apple has no About page, so its press-release boilerplate was used and is marked; GE Aerospace’s Company Overview link opens its history page, so that was read. Nothing was excluded; all 20 pages loaded. The full dataset, with the page title, first heading, full sentence and a note for every row, is available on request.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three parts of Simon Sinek’s golden circle?

Why, how and what, drawn as three rings with why in the centre. Why is the purpose, cause or belief. How is the actions and values that express it. What is the products and services. Sinek’s claim is that inspiring leaders start from the inside ring, with the question why, and work outwards.

Is the Simon Sinek golden circle still relevant?

As an editing tool for a pitch, yes. As a description of how large companies present themselves, the evidence is mixed: eight of the 20 About pages we read in November 2026 open with a why and 12 with a what, and Apple, the first example named on the TED page, opens its own boilerplate with a product and a date.

What is the difference between start with why and a mission statement?

A mission statement is a sentence a company publishes somewhere. Start with why is a rule about order: put the belief before the method and the product in anything you say. A company can have a strong mission line and still open its About page with its size, and 12 of the 20 we read do.

Use the circle on your own first sentence, then look at who is reading. Twelve of the 20 companies with the most to lose decided the reader wants the what.