Brother Mouzone on Respect and the Value of Your Word

This is part of my Series on Entrepreneurial Culture.

As Chris Dixon has aptly pointed out in a recent post, start-up culture is very much built upon people's reputation and their word as opposed to the transactional/legalistic constructs of corporate culture.  Once the word is out on someone being unreliable, mendacious, mercenary or worse, his/her career in the local ecosystem is pretty much over. Angel, VC, Entrepreneur, Lawyer- it doesn't matter. No one will fund them or want to be funded by them again and they will have difficulty finding people to work with or for them. So whereas this kind of behavior is often ignored or tolerated in corporate environments, the self-regulating "street-justice" of the start-up community is often much swifter.

So if you're just stepping into the entrepreneurial scene, have a listen to the video above in which Brother Mouzone lets Avon Barksdale understand exactly what's at stake in no uncertain terms. You could tell Avon knew the deal the minute Mouzone stepped into that barber shop. Then I recommend you read this post by my friend and colleague Stuart Ellman, appropriately titled: Respect.

As they say in The Wire, "the game is the game".