-I suppose as someone that gets the majority of my food from a local CSA, the farmer's market and a food co-op, I'm allowed to challenge your point in your reckoning. But I very fortunately live in a community where such alternatives are an option. The expense or total lack of viable alternatives to food produced by big agribusiness isn't the result of an unadulterated free market, it's in large part because of policy lobbying from these businesses for massive subsidies and anti-competitive intellectual property laws and enforcement (e.g. successfully suing farmers whose non-GMO plants were cross-pollinated by Monsanto varieties from neighboring farms). You can't use "take your business elsewhere" free-market logic when the company in question has systematically choked off competition so that there are no alternatives. You're right, what Monsanto does is with my money, in the sense that way too many of my tax dollars go to the company.
-"Evil is efficient" is a lazy and indefensible excuse for bad behavior. Green business has successfully shown that, actually, "good" can be more efficient, especially if you take a long-term view of your business.
-While I would find doing business with Monsanto personally distasteful, what Cloudant does with Monsanto is, I guess, Cloudant's business. However, trumpeting the fact in a press release makes a statement about the company's values at a level that invites public scrutiny. You can't put out a press release and then cry about the blowback you get from it.
-Finally, I think there's a larger point to be made here about the hustle that founding a startup requires and the temptations you face when things aren't going well and you're facing a quickly disappearing runway. Maybe things are moving too fast for you to really think about what you're doing but remember that the day you stop making decisions that you believe in for the sake of external pressure, your vision starts to slip away from you.
-I suppose as someone that gets the majority of my food from a local CSA, the farmer's market and a food co-op, I'm allowed to challenge your point in your reckoning. But I very fortunately live in a community where such alternatives are an option. The expense or total lack of viable alternatives to food produced by big agribusiness isn't the result of an unadulterated free market, it's in large part because of policy lobbying from these businesses for massive subsidies and anti-competitive intellectual property laws and enforcement (e.g. successfully suing farmers whose non-GMO plants were cross-pollinated by Monsanto varieties from neighboring farms). You can't use "take your business elsewhere" free-market logic when the company in question has systematically choked off competition so that there are no alternatives. You're right, what Monsanto does is with my money, in the sense that way too many of my tax dollars go to the company.
-"Evil is efficient" is a lazy and indefensible excuse for bad behavior. Green business has successfully shown that, actually, "good" can be more efficient, especially if you take a long-term view of your business.
-While I would find doing business with Monsanto personally distasteful, what Cloudant does with Monsanto is, I guess, Cloudant's business. However, trumpeting the fact in a press release makes a statement about the company's values at a level that invites public scrutiny. You can't put out a press release and then cry about the blowback you get from it.
-Finally, I think there's a larger point to be made here about the hustle that founding a startup requires and the temptations you face when things aren't going well and you're facing a quickly disappearing runway. Maybe things are moving too fast for you to really think about what you're doing but remember that the day you stop making decisions that you believe in for the sake of external pressure, your vision starts to slip away from you.