Pardon me another story. In the early 2000s, I wrote software for a startup where the founders and initial equity-holders had pledged 10% of the founding stock

Pardon me another story. In the early 2000s, I wrote software for a startup where the founders and initial equity-holders had pledged 10% of the founding stock to a certain charity. This was part of the marketing approach for the company- help us succeed and it benefits others (without affecting the competitiveness of our cost/pricing structure of our services in any particular tangible way.) There were some weaknesses in the model of mixing charity with startup-mindset (the model later changed to 10% of profits and we actually brought the charity work in-house eventually), but as a lead engineer, I actually found it quite helpful in pushing back on questionable (in my eyes) things the CEO was otherwise tempted to pursue and asking me to build (the CEO not being initially a technical guy and having any developed sense of technical ethics around spam, dark web practices, etc). If we did something really unethical (and were caught), it would actually hurt the charity we were also all trying to help and undermine part of our company's core differentiation. If you are a technical founder and bake this sort of charity commitment into your startup and its marketing on day 1, you can help people at all levels of the firm develop a more ethical culture than the average startup which faces all sorts of (often stupid) temptations.