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Comment by alastair | Hacker News Reader

This isn't spare cash, its equity. I agree with your sentiment, eg. some company giving 10% of your salary to charity on your behalf - thats obviously not a good idea, thats your money.

In the same vein, if you have equity in a company, you are free to do with it as you please - and donating 1% to charity is quite noble.

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It's all cash in the end, including equity. That cash could be spent on rewarding staff, reinvesting in the business, angel investing another start-up or on a charity.

I personally think 'giving to charity' is the worst option, my reason being that that charity giving is a moral issue and that morals should be left to individuals rather than businesses.

Your employees may find the business's favoured charity morally repulsive. I certainly would not like the fact that 1% of the effort I was giving went to a charity with whose aims I disagreed.

In a cooperative that's true, but in a capitalist corporation, the equity is owned by whoever owns it, who can dispose of it as they see fit (barring any shareholder agreements preventing certain sales). It's not like Zuckerberg is going to give his Facebook IPO capital gains to his employees, or reinvest them in the business; he's going to put them in his personal bank/brokerage account. If he had donated 1% of the equity to a charity 5 years ago, the only thing that would be different is that his personal account would have 1% less of Facebook stock in it. None of the employees or the other shareholders would be affected.

When it comes to companies spending on things that their employees might find morally repulsive, I think political contributions are a much bigger problem than charity donations. Especially since those actually come from the company's revenues, rather than being taken out of an owner's equity--- I would have much less problem with political contributions if they were donations of stock by the company's owner, rather than checks written out of the corporate budget.

In any case, the most likely thing that 1% would go into if it weren't donated, in the case of startup success, is just luxury goods/travel for the founders. Do you really think a private jet for the founder is morally superior to donating to charity? What if some of the employees are morally opposed to private jets (e.g. on environmentalist grounds)?

No, it would've hit everyone. That 1% would be dilutive to all shareholders unless he specifically carved it out of his share.

Since they're asking early-stage startups to donate 1%, I assume they're going to get the approval of all the shareholders. In that case, it's equivalent to each of the them donating a portion of their shares.

If it's diluting shareholders who don't approve of the donation, then I agree that's different.

That's actually not true. The way this is structured, it's the founder's stock that they're actually giving up. They're diluting themselves.

>> morals should be left to individuals rather than businesses

Good enough description for the state of world.

It's easy for the individuals that make business decisions to ignore morality since you are cutting them the slack.

Ignore the fact that business "morals" have much broader impact than the morals of any indivual.

Enter BP, Exxon, Monsanto, Tabaco COs, everyone on this list very limited list: http://corporatecrimereporter.com/top100.html.

Sure, businesses don't need to account for morality.

Just to clarify, I'm probably taking what you said a bit out of the context, but I think it's worth pointing out nonetheless since you phrased it that way.

Firstly, businesses don't have morals. It is ridiculous to say they have. They may have a culture but they don't have morals.

Secondly, saying that morals should be left to individuals does not mean that individuals who run a business should not act morally and seek to have his company have a positive impact on the world.

But what an owner of a business considers morally right may well be different from what some of his employees think is morally right.

I probably disagree with your morals. And you likely will not agree with mine. But at least neither of us is forced to work for an organisation that funds a charity of the other's choice whose aims we personally find morally offensive.

> Firstly, businesses don't have morals. It is ridiculous to say they have. They may have a culture but they don't have morals.

A legal person taking voluntary actions which have moral consequences must be said to have morals, in any sensible definition of the word.

You both are part of the problem, where has this meme come from that companies should be heartless bastards? Companies have become poor citizens and it's this kind of thinking that's causing it.

Before accusing people of being part of the problem, you should perhaps be a little critical of yourself and your own incoherent arguments. No-one has called for companies to be heartless bastards. Nor are companies citizens of any kind. Companies are bureaucratic capitalist structures - they don't have hearts and cannot be citizens.

My reason for disliking companies giving to charities is because it imposes a single or a small number of charities on a group of people. Not all people in that group may agree with that charity's aims.

I also think charity giving is a moral issue, and morality resides within individuals not bureaucratic capitalist structures. Not that I expect you to understand the nuance of this argument. I am just part of "the problem" - whatever that problem might be.

You just explained the problem yourself. Companies put cash and profits over causes and people. The "1% of Nothing" initiative is only encouraging founders to invest a percentage of this cash to a philanthropic cause. If I understand correctly, employees and other shareholder equity will remain unaffected. Furthermore, if they don't believe in the company's philanthropic efforts, they are still free to work or invest elsewhere.

But the problem of good and bad companies is not about how much they give to charity. I bet tobacco and arms companies give huge wads to charities but that does not make them good.

Good companies are companies whose work (their "cause" enacted by their "people") is socially beneficial. Such companies do not need to give 1% of their equity away to charities to be good - indeed to do so, would be to distract from their socially beneficial mission.

So, you support socially beneficial companies, yet object to companies diversifying their social contributions by a percentage or so? I'm sorry, but I just don't buy the argument that donating a percentage of equity from each founder would be distractive.

It would be 1% distracting.

Also, 1% diversified. If 99% of a company's social value isn't good, at least a percentage may be.

Does morality lie within a charitable nonprofit corporation? If not, how is there morality in charitable giving? Where does that morality go?

So is a company a person now?

In a way, it already is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

If anything, this pledge is just trying to invoke one percentage of empathy in the mind of this sociopath.

That's a (disputed) point of law, not a law of sociology or psychology or spirituality or such.

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