I can really relate to the parent comment. I have worked at two VC-funded startups, one which was an "uber of x" and the other is a IoT consumer electronics startup.
The former was unethical in the way it treated the workers (I mean independent contractors). The higher ups treated the app/company as a beautiful product that would save the world (or the yuppies at least), but rarely acknowledged the actual workers who made the cogs spin, and was more focused on Growth and branding than actually treating people well.
Something I always think about is the dark pattern they had in the app which would only ask you to rate/review on Yelp/app stores if you had given a 5 star rating to the job. They also hacked Yelp to show the Yelp option to people they determined were most likely to leave a good Yelp review. If you have a good product/service that you believe in, you shouldn't need to do this type of thing. Oh, and of course the company was not following the labor/insurance laws in the states where it worked and had several cease and desist orders they ignored.
The hardware startup had like 20% RMA rates because of components would fail over and over. They used VC money to subsidize the returns/repairs instead of fixing the problem. They would prefer to ship more crappy products instead of fewer good products. Not so much illegal (hard to be when selling electronics, yay regulations), but unethical in that they would ship so much garbage despite being "customer obsessed." They operated more like a software company than a hardware company. It's easy to remotely fix software, but hardware is a very different beast and that was something they didn't want to admit.
Compared to my current company, a 30 person electronics firm that has already been acquired and never did too much VC nonsense. We are profitable and sell a good product (1% RMA) that customers enjoy. Instead of "moving fast and breaking things" (a slogan I feel the first two companies embody), we work hard to get things just right before shipping the product so that we never get any returned merchandise but get lots of return customers.
I wonder if this shady/unethical behavior is more focused in consumer startups. In enterprise SaaS, for example, unethical behavior is a low-EV move because your customers will have standing to cancel their contracts or pursue you for damages. It's also harder to be shady under the scrutiny of 500 large recurring-revenue customers than 500,000 tiny ones.
