Building a startup is an ethical venture
Building something new, that people want, is of huge value and there’s even more value if we build something that people actually need.
Startup or New Business?
Let’s start by differentiating between a startup and a new business. A startup is a new business, but not all new businesses are startups. A startup is an organization that is building something new and has the potential to grow big and fast. The difference between one and another is not always clear but here’s a look at both extremes of the range which might help us understand it better.
The huge value add of startups:
- Microsoft gave us the personal computer, before it, computers were a strange thing that almost no one ever dreamt of having or even using one.
- WhatsApp made it easy for everyone of us to instantly send messages to anyone we wanted to at no cost for both the sender and recipient.
- Square enabled small merchants and customers to use credit cards where it was either too costly or not possible before.
- AirBnb gave home owners a second income while giving travelers the opportunity to vacation with a local experience at a cheaper price.
- Zoom lets us connect to anyone wherever it is they are and see each other’s faces with a super clear audio.
And then of course you have these “traditional businesses” that also found a way to make things so differently that their value add is way beyond their competition and some might consider them to be startups.
Let’s take Ikea as an example. One might argue that they are still a furniture store but we can also say that they created a product, service and experience that did not exist before, meeting a previously unmet need to give their customers economic options to have beautiful furniture while also having the experience of assembling them together. Some might say that Ikea was never a startup and others that it once was.
I talk about the startup status changing during time taking into account Eric Rise’s definition of a startup. He is the author of the best selling book, The Lean Startup, here’s his definition:
A startup is a temporary human organization design to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.
This definition has three words that help us understand what a startup is.
- Temporary — Facebook was a startup, but it no longer is one. Facebook has already found a repeatable and scalable business model.
- Search — A new business is not searching, they already have the playbook, it was written by many others before them.
- Scalable —The goal is to build something new that serves a lot of people, not something that’s going to stay in a garage or in just one city.
I am not implying, at least not yet, that one is better than the other, simply that they are different. To define what is better we first have to agree on the objective that’s being pursued and the way to measure progress towards that goal, both of which we haven’t agreed to.
Why is building a startup an ethical venture?
We, as a species, are creating more and more problems for our world, the ecosystem, plants animals and even ourselves. We have been creating these problems because of different causes from religion to political systems including technological innovations which are also posible solutions to these problems.
Albert Einstein said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
If we want to build something new if we are aspiring to different and better results we need not to open more businesses nor have existing businesses produce more horses for us to travel but new innovative businesses creating new alternatives as solutions for different problems and opportunities. Not all startups will solve a problem that hasn’t been fixed, some of them might even create new and devastating problems like a super elite class of humans as discussed in Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus, but it is startups that have the capacity to create good and solve both existing problems and non-existing problems not just for a few but for many if not all, both with incremental innovations as well as with disrupting ones.
The entrepreneur is trying to build something new because he believes that there’s a possibility of having a different result, he believes that a different result is necessary and he also probably believes that he has the ethical imperative to pursue this new venture.
One sure way to get rid of many of these problems is to create startups, this is the main reason why I believe that building a startup is an ethical venture. Of course that there are some bad apples out there and there are also some startups that are solving more important problems than others, but I truly believe that most entrepreneurs out there, while they probably didn’t start with a “do good” objective in mind somewhere in the process they started and continue to realize that doing something good is not only necessary but way more satisfying.
So, what’s better, a startup or a new business?
As I said before, it depends mostly on the objective that we are trying to accomplish with one or the other.
If the objective is to generate a good income that enables us to live peacefully while improving our quality of life with the least possible risk, then the answer is clearly a new business, since startups have a a higher risk of failure than new businesses, are probably not going to give us a good income (at least not at the beginning) and probably won’t let us live peacefully for a few years.
If the objective is to make sure that we always have a new challenge to conquer, lessons to learn and the constant dream of changing the world while believing that we can actually achieve it with what we are doing, then a startup is the correct answer. I am not saying that there’s no challenge and lessons in new businesses just not as many and as different as they are when building a startup. Building a startup is, by definition, building something that no one has built before, so there’s no playbook, there’s no guide, this makes every challenge and lesson one that we have not encountered before and probably one that no one ever has.
Now, so far we have only discussed personal objectives, we haven’t gotten into collective ones. Which is the whole point of this article.
If the objective is to improve the lives of as many persons as possible, improve our planet, take better care of all living species including plants and animals, then I believe that in most cases a startup is a better fit to achieve these objectives than a new business.
We had horses to move us around from town to town 150 years ago, but it wasn’t until Henry Ford that we could all move farther and faster than ever imagined. Then Tesla appeared to solve the pollution and other issues caused by cars, trains, and many other innovations coming up to a point where the world doesn’t need more Fords, but new Teslas.
Thank you
Thanks to all entrepreneurs and startup employees who are working not just to improve your quality of life but most importantly that of others. Thank you for taking advantage of the luck you have had in life and turning it into the reason to help others. Thank you for being ethical and responsible.
