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Do founders' political views affect how you see a product?
There is a product I really like. Love using it, love tinkering with it, and I buy into the overall vision. Founder has also always been pretty respectful publicly.
But I recently came across some of their political views and now I just feel a bit weird about it. Nothing changed about the product, just how I feel.
Do you separate the product from the founder? Does this change whether you keep using something? Or only if it starts showing up in the product?
Don’t ask what the product is. It doesn’t matter and I’m not going to share.
We shouldn't separate them.
Capitalism and democracy is often sold to us under the assumption that humanity is intelligent and can calculate depth.
Let's say Company A makes $100 products but creates 5000 units of pollution. Company B sells their product at $95 but creates 15000 units of pollution.
In this case, the penalty for pollution is built into the free market. Pollution is still necessary, but at what point is it just reckless? But this can only be the case as long as the market is aware of this cost.
"Political opinion" is an umbrella term for something that should be abstracted out. Global warming is a political opinion. People can just have the "opinion" that the pollution doesn't exist. Same for sweatshops, child labor, bribery, corruption, women's rights, and all these other pollution-like effects that damage the world.
Yes, I like my cheap, high quality t-shirts from Bangladesh, and I like the low cost labor that bring me my $0.16 tea bags. I like the water-guzzling, plagiarism machines that write my code for me.
But we have to decide at what point we tolerate these costs and for what output.
Depends. I prefer not to give money to people who will use that money to achieve political ends that horrify or disgust me. I’m boycotting a select number of companies for that reason.
That said, they’re generally not early stage startups — more typically megacorps whose owners or lobbying arms have sufficient wealth/power/influence to make a meaningful impact that’s harming our economy, democracy, or social order. Sometimes a scale-up whose externalities are particularly destructive.
> Do you separate the product from the founder?
Yes… if the founder does. I don't care on which side of which ring they are as long as they keep me out of their pointless fights.
Interesting! Yeah founder never imposed or brought those into the conversation
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