2026: Starting the yr with an ethics-first technique
As a founder, the new year is a vital time to plan ahead and to interrogate the blind spots that exist inside our companies. It is during this season when we are most tempted to focus on growth without equal attention to the risks that growth can create.
As I write this, I am in between working sessions on my organization’s 2026 strategic business plan. Beneath simple growth metrics sit harder questions. What are the unintended consequences of scaling? Where might we leave people behind? Whose perspectives are we missing?
Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Koko.
Risk can mean a lot of things depending on your company and context. As a technology product CEO at a mental health nonprofit, my focus centers on safety and ethics.
When your work affects people who are vulnerable, especially young people, as ours does, there comes a point when many decisions can be viewed as both a risk and an opportunity. When your work sits at that intersection, you cannot treat ethics as a box to be checked. You have to develop systems of ethics as core infrastructure.
The problem is that by the time safety and ethical risks are obvious, the systems that created them are already entrenched. That realization led my team and I to build a formal ethics review into how we develop our blueprint for the years ahead.
Building ethics into your company (and what that actually looks like)
1. Clear redlines
Ethics teams are often misunderstood as abstract or academic. Founders want to move fast and assume that bringing in an ethics team will create unnecessary processes that add friction. In practice, ethics teams are deeply operational. They exist to guide real decisions in real time.
Once we chose an ethics team (Compass Ethics) to work with, the first thing we did was write down explicit redlines. These were things we would never do. Not if they helped us grow faster. Not if the board asked for them. Not if a partner contract depended on it. Never.
We committed publicly to constraints like never deceiving users about whether they are interacting with AI, never selling user data, and never running experiments designed to monetize vulnerability.
These are not value statements. These are non-negotiables. Publishing them made it easier for our team to design responsibly and easier for anyone to raise concerns without fear of slowing things down unnecessarily.
2. A process for consistency
From there, ethics review became part of how work starts, not how it ends.
Every new product idea or research effort begins with a simple question: does this cross any of our redlines? If the answer is no, we assess risk. Is this a minor iteration or something genuinely new? Could someone be worse off if it fails? Are we introducing uncertainty or operating within known boundaries?
Low-risk changes move quickly. Higher-risk work triggers deeper review, sometimes involving an independent external ethics board with no financial or professional stake in approving what we want to build.
That independence matters. Nonconflicted ethics teams do not exist to say yes. They exist to surface blind spots leaders are structurally bad at seeing on their own.
3. Audits, stopping rules, and learning when to pause
For higher-risk work, we now define stopping rules before anything goes live. If certain signals appear, such as unexpected distress, degraded outcomes, or increased risk, we pause or shut things down. No improvising. No sunk-cost rationalization.
Clear ethics processes remove the burden of judgment calls made in isolation. Engineers do not have to wonder whether raising a concern will be seen as disloyal. Leaders do not have to make high-stakes decisions without a framework when pressure is highest.
At first, this feels slower. Over time, it becomes faster because fewer decisions turn into emergencies.
Why this matters as we enter 2026
As we head into a new year, many leaders are asking what they should build next. Perhaps we would all be better off by first asking how we can build better.
Building ethics teams early did not make our work easier, but in many ways it made it simpler. It brought clarity. It replaced ambiguity with constraints and anxiety with process.
There is a quiet benefit to this approach that I did not anticipate. It helps CEOs, myself included, sleep better at night. Knowing there is a credible system and independent people designed to catch what you might miss is more effective than melatonin, in my experience.
As we enter a new year, may we lead in ways that invite more perspectives and hold us accountable to what matters most: the people impacted by what we build.
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