hi everyone charles hoskinson here live from warm sunny colorado you get two videos in one day how about that exciting and fired up so earlier today i noticed in my email box that david barrett from expensify sent an email to all of my employees and me telling me to vote for joe biden i don't think in the history of doing business me doing business i've ever received from an established company who is a service provider this this close to election time a email an unsolicited email asking our people to vote for a political candidate uh this in every sense in every business school uh every way you frame it is just simply a bad idea uh and i figured i'd talk a little bit about how i do politics and how my company does politics you'll notice that i'm pretty political guy i have a twitter feed a youtube page i've got all these different uh social media channels and all the time i appear and i opine on certain things whether it be libertarian ideology or monetary policy or socialism versus capitalism or the black lives matter's movement versus organization uh these types of things great what i don't do is i don't broadcast that through the iohk twitter channel or the ihk youtube page or anything that has to do with my company because i have a very basic principle my opinions are my opinions i'm an american we're entitled to have opinions and it's okay to be political in fact it's a good thing to actually express yourself and feel that you have the freedom to share ideas some you agree with some you don't agree with some right some wrong and every now and then we have to change our ideas because it turns out that the world has evolved that's a good thing it is not the place of my business however to prescribe a particular ideology whatever it is to our employees and into our customers i do not care if you work for me as a contractor employee if you are frofting for the mouth communist just just crazed and dazed in the eye czechovaria shirt and everything or if you're a hardcore libertarian crypto anarchist doesn't matter to me okay i say what is a job we're doing what are our goals what's our mission how are we going to get it done and we figure that out together we try to create a friendly good working experience and we talk about ethics and character and we kind of work our way through that okay as for our customers i don't really care who our customers are their political ideology and we never tell them what they should believe what they should do we tell them that the technology we build carries in it a philosophy so we tend not to bid and do business on deals that require proprietary software we tend not to bid and do deals with certain governments that violate human rights for example we will never do a deal with the government of china or saudi arabia for obvious reasons uh and these are decisions i've made as the ceo that said in all of our business relationships we say act with legality and integrity and character and let's focus on the job we were hired to do okay so that's the separation of concerns there and a lot of ceos do that a lot of companies do that what is bizarre and perhaps even a violation of campaign finance laws and i really do hope someone contacts the federal elections commission about this because it does look like an in-kind contribution is when a ceo takes their business mailing lists and decides to use those lists to support a particular political candidate i am not a trump supporter on many occasions i've called him the orange goblin nor am i a biden supporter actually personally i endorsed a different political candidate but regardless of where i said it is not appropriate for a ceo of a company unsolicited to take my employees emails and email those employees a piece of political propaganda saying you should support my particular candidate i understand those in silicon valley have become so woke that this basic fact of business conduct escapes them and they think it's an act of courage no it's simply put an act of stupidity now apparently we did have a commercial relationship with expensify i remember using it in the early days of ihk's history and i'm having my cfo chased down if we have any remaining commercial relationship with the organization and i don't think we do but if we do we will immediately cancel it and roll over to a different vendor i'm sorry if you get woken this way you're going to go broke this is not appropriate i do not appreciate my employees being sent unsolicited political emails they didn't ask for it i didn't ask for that we did not do business with that organization with the expectation that it's also a political campaign for a particular political party i think that's a common sense baseline way of doing business super super important that we hold each other to that standard we have never once despite how political i have been in my social media channels breach that firewall between my personal beliefs and what our company does the only time we take stands is we take stands on human rights that's it and i think all businesses need to do that if we desire to live in a better world but we don't interfere with u.s elections or do income contributions to particular political candidates it's an absurd thing and if this is now the standard of business in silicon valley it makes me deeply disturbed because i think that those businesses are ultimately going to lose so many customers now apparently when i do business with a company i'm now doing business with a particular political party that makes me sad it's not the way it should be that's not the way it ought to be and apparently this is what the expensify ceo wants to do i have a suspicion that there's going to be overwhelming blow back from this decision and i have a suspicion that they're going to lose a lot of business from it and i hope that happens because it will disincentivize other ceos from making this decision of breaching that firewall and weaponizing their company and forcing their employees whether they agree with the political ideology or not to have to follow one or risk losing their jobs that's always wrong it's always immoral and it's fundamentally un-american in that respect it's a shameful cowardice act on the behalf of the ceo of expensify and i really do hope there's commercial consequences for it if there are none well then i guess this is the age that we live in and all i can control is the conduct of my company and how we work with people and i will remind you to our employees contractors and the customers who work with us we are a political in this respect we appreciate diversity of thought we welcome people to share their opinions occasionally people reach out to me and say is it okay if i read a blog on something i said don't worry about it go ahead and do it your opinion is your own it's fine uh we live in we'd like to live and hope we live in a free society where people have freedom of expression this is something i care about very deeply and opinions if you want to share them share them i i asked i hope that they're backed by facts and critical thinking and of course whenever you share controversial things it can create some frictions and problems and we tend to work our way through them in fact i recall years ago uh on the back of one employee sharing a particular opinion about staffing that i wrote a blog post called maelstrom and i'd highly encourage people to look at that blog post in that particular context as an example of dialogues that come up you have to have courage to encourage them but i think that ultimately produces a great culture but i will never tell my employees who they must vote for or should vote for and i'll never tell my customers which political candidate they should endorse that simply is just egregious it's blacks it's bereft of of any common sense and it's bad business absolutely bad business i could not believe the email i got my first thought was he must have been hacked this just can't be real so i immediately went looked into it and apparently not only did it happen they're doubling down on it so uh that's the news of the morning expensify i guess uh your money is going straight to the democratic national party it's uh political operation for them now just know that if you use their services if those are your values great if those aren't your values well perhaps we should not reward corporations uh that decide to do this to their customers and again i really do not appreciate that my employees unsolicited or sent a political campaign ad for a particular candidate it disturbed me deeply and i'd ask in the future it does not happen and i think it may actually be a violation of campaign finance law is an income contribution to the biden campaign but unfortunately a lot of people seem to get away with these things these days all right thank you so much for listening i really do appreciate it every now and then i make videos about politics and this time it's not even about me it's about uh someone else to us and uh you all take care now i hope everybody can get along especially after this election closes however it ends up cheers
