Comment by miyoji
3 months ago
Do you typically start companies that are opposed to your values, or do you start companies that align with your values?
If you are the co-CEO of a company, will you push it to align more with your values, or less?
This isn't a company founded 300 years ago by a long-dead evil man in a business vertical completely unrelated to how it started, it's a baby company with the evil founder still actively involved at the highest level of management. Maybe you can regale me with epic stories about the companies you've worked at where the founder had no ability to influence the company and its values, but that's not been my experience at all, in any human organization anywhere.
Two things:
1. People definitely start companies with a certain set of values and behaviors (as a company) and do entirely separate things in their private life. This is trivially true.
2. I don't think the personal values and the business mission in this case are even in conflict. You can be a racist and support free speech / privacy. Indeed, I'd actually say the venn diagram of "racists" and "people who vociferously espouse free speech ideals" is more union than it is disjoint.
1. You can't separate it out that cleanly, your beliefs bleed into what you do, no matter who you are or what you believe, and vice versa. I also don't think people start companies that are in contradiction with their values, and they definitely don't remain co-CEOs of them.
2. I don't think they're in conflict, either, I think the company's values are the founders' values and I think those values have been revealed to be bad.
You actually need to demonstrate that though. I have seen no evidence of Mullvad (again, as a company) behaving in a racist or anti-immigrant manner. Until that has been demonstrated, you cannot just say "this guy behaves this way so that is what his company does".
Regardless you can always say "I don't want to give this company money because that indirectly is gonna funnel money to an anti-immigrant political party in Sweden", and that is a perfectly valid position to take. But a lot of people in this thread are clearly going a step further than that, ostensibly in an attempt to give them a greater sense of moral superiority than is necessarily deserved.
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