[hedayet]

Developments like this make me less interested in building a "successful" tech company.

It increasingly feels like operating at that scale can require compromises I’m not comfortable making. Maybe that’s a personal limitation—but it’s one I’m choosing to keep.

I’d genuinely love to hear examples of tech companies that have scaled without losing their ethical footing. I could use the inspiration.

[johanneskanybal]

Maybe this is a weird arena to state the obvious. But you don't need to build a multi-billion vc/public company. Build a smaller revenue generating company without outside funding and it's up to you.

[hedayet]

I get your point. The dilemma is whether to build something small that no one would bother compete against, or build something novel (which all of us want) but then risk someone with VC funding to come after.

That being said, I think I need to learn more about how to build smaller revenue generating good companies.

[apothegm]

If you want to be able to retain ethics, among other things make sure not to take the company public. Then you’re basically legally required to drop ethics in favor of profits.

Also don’t take investment from anyone who isn’t fully aligned ethically. Be skeptical of promises from people you don’t personally know extremely well.

That may limit you to slower growth, or cap your growth (fine if you want to run a company and take home $2M/ye from it; not fine if you want to be acquired for $100M and retire.) It may also limit you to taking out loans to fund growth that you can’t bootstrap to, which is a different kind of risky.

[ozmodiar]

I've been thinking of this too. I think Steam is, and I'll even throw in Mozilla, despite a few missteps. Gog seems okay, but that's much smaller. If we can expand to large tech organizations then Wikipedia has remained pretty consistent. Even Steam doesn't have a corporate structure in the traditional sense, and I couldn't think of a single publicly traded company I'd trust.

[tencentshill]

Ethics would be compromised well before hitting that kind of valuation. No one gets there cleanly.