LinkedIn cofounder and Greylock Partners investor Reid Hoffman tells executives who are running startups that scale fast — the kind who want to double in size every few months — to build ethics into their businesses.
As companies plan for the future and grow their engineering or sales ranks, they should consider what can go wrong, he said, and hire people whose job is dedicated to risk management. (Former DARPA director Regina Dugan suggested the same at an AI conference for CEOs held by Samsung last year.) Next, he added, companies can develop a risk framework to sort risk levels. Anything that can be a catastrophic risk to individuals, a systemic risk to company systems, or a risk to a large number of users should be handled in a proactive way to stay competitive with other startups.