Hey, whatever it was, I appreciate people like you are out there regardless of whether the thing got done anyway.

I'm in currently in the valley of death phase of startup life working on a tiny piece of the climate problem, but when the day comes that I'm in a position to hire teams I want them to be able to look me in the eye and oppose me when I'm going off the ethics track. How we got here to needing the climate problem fixed was people making their peace with consequences of their actions, and it's not going to be solved by doubling down on that approach.

In my experience big tech is no more ethical than startups. I respect where you are coming from though, there are plenty of other reasons startups are hard. Much of the ethical tapestry at a startup is on the founders.

I’ve done it too. So it’s you + me + McDonald + ...

You know, for all its evils, it is sometimes surprising that the world is relatively peaceful (for 60% of the globe), full of donators, people fighting for women, people refusing to participate to bad schemes. Even in opposing views, most people are doing it because they believe the world will be better like this. Also, absolute stupid people have always been the norm, and the bad ones have always been assertive and powerful and yet, the world is not so bad, so we are on a good streak.

me too. IP issues - founders stealing engineers ideas, scanning their email for IP but not naming them as inventors in the patent filings.

Karma is a bitch, has a long memory, and delivers retribution.