The Future 1%
You’re an entrepreneur and you’re watching the Occupy Wall Street protest and you’re all for it. You know the current system is broken, you’re cool, you’re hip, and wanting change is what being an entrepreneur is all about. You’re not a big company corporate executive millionaire. You’ve never milked the system for money, and you don’t even work in a financial company on Wall Street. You’re an entrepreneur so you don’t really have anything to do with this problem, right? Wrong. Like it or not, you’re part of it.
As millions protest corporate greed and the lack of transparency in our system, we need think about how these issues are actually going to be solved. The 1% won’t, the protesters can’t, but you and I can. How? Because tomorrow’s corporate greed will happen in tomorrow’s corporations and tomorrow’s corporations are today’s startups. Get it? You aren’t just working on disrupting products and services from today’s incumbents, but their corporate culture as well. Their greed, their lack of transparency, and their old way of doing business will be replaced by a new breed of up and coming startups. Unfortunately, yesterday’s startups never got this, and instead ended up maintaining the status quo and becoming a part of the problem.
Corporate greed doesn’t just happen because of greedy people, it happens because non-greedy people are consumed by a culture that allows greed to take place. The foundation of a company’s culture is set very early on in the life of a company. The founders and startup executives are responsible for setting that culture. So before you dismiss all of this and think that you aren’t setting a culture that could possibly lead your company to become tomorrow’s greedy corporation, stop and ask yourself how transparent are you being with your compensation to your employees? Are you cashing out of your common stock before employees are? Or even without them knowing that you are? How do you talk about your customers internally? Is it positive or are you bad mouthing them? Are your partners strategic pawns or are they benefiting from these partnerships in the long term?
Entrepreneurs, the problem starts with us, and it can end with us as well. Today’s 1% is not tomorrow’s 1%. If we are going to solve this problem, we need to understand how we can prevent corporate greed from taking over the entities that we are creating by establishing transparent and ethical norms starting today.
