More on values

I’ve recently blogged about companies living by their values, here and gave an example with Google and China here.

I was having lunch yesterday with a former senior management team member of Akamai, and he told me an inspiring story from their expansion stage days.

Akamai’s executives noticed that a substantial part of their business was coming from adult content providers.

They debated the issue, and decided that it wasn’t what Akamai wanted to be, it wasn’t aligned with their values, and stopped supporting adult content on its service.

Did they pass on sales? Sure they did. But they felt they could still be successful without that revenue, and it was more important to them to be a certain kind of company.

Similarly, as a venture capital fund, we have passed on what appeared to be lucrative opportunities but whose business did not align with our values as a firm, regardless of what individual team members felt.

And we’ve never looked back.