The Peers Project founder and chief executive officer
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Earlier this year, during the Black Lives Matter movement, we ran a “Black Voices Matter” campaign to amplify and promote Black voices across Australia.
As a woman of colour in media, I feel it’s both a duty and privilege to advocate for diverse representation in the industry and beyond.
Our campaign resulted in a more than 15% growth in followers across our social channels, and, in turn, we saw an uptick in sales of our newly launched podcast course Podcast Power 101™.
Ethics matter. Diversity and inclusion matters. And it most certainly does affect the bottom line.
Jelix Ventures founder and chief executive officer
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Consistently behaving with integrity and strong ethics has engendered trust and built our reputation as investors who founders, our syndicate investors and co-investors can trust.
This has allowed Jelix to attract and retain our active investors and to punch above our weight in winning deals.
This was illustrated recently when, after investing considerable time and effort into an attractive deal we were at risk of losing, we declined to obtain an investment allocation by backing another investor to undermine an existing investment agreement.
After the dust settled, not only was an allocation carved out for us, but we were given access to the secondaries.
So we got into a highly competitive deal that was really punching above our weight.
But the more important benefit will be the strengthening of our relationships with each of the players, paving the way for more co-investments.
Business is about relationships with people, and trust is critical.
On a more personal note, I have been delighted to find that in the wonderful business of investing in inspiring startups daring to change the world and make it better, strong adherence to the highest ethical standards is highly valued.
And this has real currency in building relationships with our customers, our investors and entrepreneurs.
Inkl chief executive officer
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In the news aggregation space, 99% of companies don’t pay for content. Instead, they just hive off headlines and thumbnails, and sometimes entire articles.
But this is immensely harmful to the publishers and journalists who invest time and money in producing these important news stories.
When we created Inkl as a platform for reliable information (i.e. an alternative to the misinformation on Facebook and Twitter), we had to choose how we would deal with news publishers.
Most people, including many VCs, told us to just keep the product free and take the publishers’ headlines like everyone else was. We chose not to.
Instead, we decided to build a brand new business model, based on paying for licenses to all the content on Inkl.
And boy has it paid off!
Today, in a world where there are paywalls on every major news site, we are the only company that has licenses for the content behind those paywalls.
Meanwhile, our competitors who built their businesses on free headlines are struggling now because readers can’t get through to the content.
So that one ethical decision we made at the start has not just borne fruit, it has become the trunk from which our entire business has grown.
Luxury Escapes co-founder, angel investor and former corporate lawyer
If businesses have to think of a specific example of acting ethically, then we’ve got some issues as a nation.
It’s, unfortunately, a sad fact that many businesses in Australia are monopolies or oligopolies and tend to profit from win-lose transactions, often at the expense of suppliers or customers.
We’re lucky enough to be a curated marketplace product which brings together sellers and buyers using technology to create win-win-win transactions by removing friction and agency costs.
In short, we try to run Luxury Escapes in the most ethical manner possible all the time and focus on building long-term relationships with our hotel and tour partners and our members.
While we don’t get it right every time, ultimately, our decisions are guided by doing what’s right, and while that may mean you make less profit in the short term, in the medium and long term, you earn the trust of your partners on both the demand and supply sides.
Michelle is founder and CEO at specialist podcast production agency The Peers Project.
