The Resilient Founder

7Do the Right Thing

When it comes to morality and ethics in business, these make strange bedfellows. Most start-ups launch themselves with mission statements that are worthy of being tattooed on the founders' forearms. But these mission statements get altered, adjusted, or deleted as soon as success and big money starts to roll in. And in this crazy dance, a few ground realities prevail. There are no simple answers or easy formulas to appease one and all. Entrepreneurs will be often be beset with ethical conundrums at various stages of growth and inflection points.

ETHICS AT WORK

“We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served – as shareholders and in all other ways – by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short- term gains,” Google's public offering prospectus proclaimed. When co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin recommended some guiding principles like “don’t be evil”, then CEO Eric Schmidt thought this was the stupidest rule ever. As he saw it, there's no book that wrote much about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible. Almost 15 years after its IPO, as its market cap grew from $23 billion to over a trillion, Alphabet – Google's parent company – changed their motto from “Don't be evil” to “Do the right thing.”

At Uber, all that mattered was growth. Its motto was win at all costs and let's make sure archaic concepts like ethics do not mess up that rising trajectory. We can apologize, pay fines, hire lobbyists, ...