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Ask HN: What do you think of a viral ethical investor agreement?
2 points
wbeckler
13 years ago
I was inspired and a little agitated by Bruce Sterling's speech here: http://boingboing.net/2013/04/29/bruce-sterling-on-startups-r.html

I asked myself, as a budding entrepreneur, what can I do to actually disrupt things, or at least make sure the world is a significantly better place as a result of what I'm building?

What if I obligated my company with a set of constraints, like a "B corp" but stronger, as a real "do no evil" ethical charter. If a socially beneficial company succeeds, however, the rich still get richer and that money can end up funding anything, even bad stuff. But what if I obligated investors to remain within a set of ethical standards for usage of the profits they make from me? What if we had a viral investor agreement: money made from this can only go into ethical endeavors. And what if those endeavors had to also subscribe to the same viral agreement, like a GPL for ethical investment?

Would this ever work? What could feasibly go into such an agreement with it still being palatable to at least a few like minded investors?