Can the Tech Industry be Trusted to Police Itself?

Why the largely self-regulated world of venture-backed start-ups has spawned some of the most intriguing criminal scandals.

This article originally appeared in Literary Hub’s Crime Reads.

Photo by Kindel Media

I have spent most of my professional career in Silicon Valley. In my 25 years in tech, I’ve worked at everything from a two-person, seed-stage start-up, to a 40,000-employee, publicly-traded company. Mostly, I’ve worked at companies somewhere in-between those extremes—venture-backed tech start-ups that have raised millions of dollars in financing but are still private companies.

The reality of these private, venture-backed companies is they operate largely without oversight.

Most of the time, this is fine. Certainly, the companies I have worked for have all been managed ethically and legally—with the notable exception of MCI, which had the misfortune of being acquired by WorldCom in 1998 and later found guilty of one of the biggest securities frauds of all time. WorldCom was caught because it was a public company with public market oversight. But it always struck me as an interesting question: who provides that oversight for private companies?