The last time the issue of "abrupt" startup shutdowns messing up people's lives was debated on HN, the was a contingent that insisted that the founders and leadership have a fiduciary duty to share holders to hold out for a miracle. If they release a firmware that unlocks the robots, they are immediately setting their startups worth to about $0, when they could be bought out at the last minute for a couple of millions. Or so the story goes, I think it's immoral. When your left with <1 mo of runway, the best thing for your employees and consumers would be an orderly exit. VCs may not like that though, so it tends not to happen.
Personally, I love the phrase fiduciary duty. I use it all the time to help rationalize the choices I make, to ensure I maintain my fiduciary duty to myself, and use it liberally to convince my friends it's ok fight for raises, or the new job they want. I think I like it also, because of the context it has to live within my brain. A long time ago, when I was a young teenager, I was arguing, with a named partner for a huge lawfirm (family friends) about if a large company had to cede identifying information about users to $government. I made that same argument, they have a duty to shareholders. His retort was a simple. "No, this is a human rights issue, you can just say 'we're not playing'". That was a quick end to that conversation, because of how insane it is to suggest giving up human rights for money.
Fiduciary responsibility is nice and all, but have you tried upholding your responsibility to protecting human rights too? Sure, yes startup founders have a responsibility to hope for a miracle "for the shareholders!" but they have a much higher priority to human rights.
> That was a quick end to that conversation, because of how insane it is to suggest giving up human rights for money.
It is insane when you write it out kike that, but this is further complicated by money providing extrinsic motivation, and caring about human rights being intrinsic, at least with our current economic system and jurisprudence with laissez-faire approach to human rights violations (see wage theft for a direct example of the insanity). C-suites are more worried about shareholder lawsuits than they are about those from either consumer or employees.
My suspicion is that there's active filtering that prevents those who "overly" care about human rights from climbing too high up the leadership ladder at for-profit organizations.
