Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive unethical behavior?
Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive unethical behavior?
Remember Zynga?
- 10/31/2009 Techcrunch started the whole Scamville issue over Zynga’s lead gen business with rebill offers.
- 01/08/2010 Techcrunch awarded the CEO of Zynga, the one they blasted just 2 months before in over a dozen posts with “CEO of the Year” award.
How about DB?
- 02/05/2010 He gets caught posting stories in exchange for compensation, I post that he is the intern in question. And everyone jumps on me for outing him. Actual quotes:
- Oh come on, he’s a teenager
- We don’t have to out him, though. Let him privately make amends.
- He’s 17 years old ffs. This is not appropriate content.
- Even if he asked for something, he deserves a second chance, considering his age
- is it really worth harming his image for it?
- We all make mistakes as a teenager, often involving a lack of ethics.
- I was never this dumb about stuff like this, but I was just as dumb about other stuff. I’d give him a second chance.
- The actual thread was actually deleted, and I was
soft bannedor soft-suspended
How about ReadWriteWeb trying to get sock puppets to post links?
- Jacques posts that he got approached by a RWW writer to submit the stuff to HN and?
- the highest voted comment tells him: “This sort of submission doesn’t accomplish anything except starting arguments.”
- another gem: “What is the big deal here?
Where’s accountability? What is it with the “boys will be boys” mentality?
Hell yeah, it’s worth harming the image over it. If you don’t want to hurt your reputation…how about this…stop doing unethical shit? Simple ain’t it?
Here is a little rule you should learn to follow….if you think you’ll be embarrassed by your behavior getting plastered on the front page of New York Times…don’t fucking do it.
So to get back to the original question…why is the startup culture so eager to defend unethical behavior? It seems like I’m the only one who cares about ethics in the startup culture.
P.S. And before you start, I’ve been on both ends of the equation. I was offered money to promote someone’s product, and I’ve been told to pony up some dough to get a post on another blog. Somehow I didn’t have a problem saying no. You don’t need balls of steel to be able to say no. I guess that’s the difference in how we were raised.
