Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

YC does not (to my knowledge) have a corporate position on the presidential race - I'd welcome any citations where a YC partner, speaking in an official capacity, endorses one of the current presidential candidates. When they have taken corporate political positions, it's usually been narrowly defined, in support of specific legislation that affects the tech industry (eg. anti-SOPA, anti-software-patents, pro-immigration).

The vast majority of YC partners' personal positions are strongly pro-Clinton. You can see that just by following sama, paulg, or paultoo on Twitter.

View on HN

It would suffice for me to see any public reluctance on the part of Paul Graham or Sam Altman to continue to associate professionally with Thiel so long as he is playing this role in American politics.

I don't demand that Altman and Graham know exactly what to do about this. I don't demand that they "fire" Thiel (they can't, as Thiel isn't an employee). I don't even demand that they strike him from the roster of Partners to the Regional Partner of YC. I understand that this stuff is complicated and that there's more going on behind the scenes of these relationships than we know.

Unfortunately, both Altman and Graham are being supportive of Thiel, despite the fact that he donated $1.25MM to Trump's campaign just days ago.

Isn't the fact that they're making it clear that they're against Trump enough? Why do you think they need to also be against Thiel, "just" because of his political activities?

Clearly everyone would find it incredibly wrong if someone would withdraw support for someone just because they supported Hillary Clinton, and while most people here think Trump is much worse, he is the head of one of the 2 major parties. You might not like it, but his actions and views do represent a significant portion of the mainstream (which is why this isn't the same as supporting someone from the KKK, which does thankfully lie outside the mainstream).

Note: I am in no way endorsing or defending Trump, or Thiel.

In a real way, Thiel is Trump. He's a part of Trump's political campaign. He's no mere supporter: he's a surrogate. He was placed on stage at the RNC to suggest to the world that Silicon Valley supported Trump. His recent donation to Trump is still on the front page of CNN.

You cannot coherently oppose Trump and support Trump's political campaign.

Let me put it this way:

According to the logic that Altman and Graham are using, if Donald Trump himself were a "part-time partner" at YC, they would be unable to disassociate themselves from him.

He's not, though. There are still boundaries between individuals even when individuals come out in support of someone.

There's certainly a line where someone stops being "just" a supporter and becomes something more. E.g. a big complaint against Brendan Eich was that he wasn't just anti-gay-rights, he actually contributed money for the Prop 8 fight.

The big question is where that line should be drawn. You say Thiel is a Trump surrogate, but I'm not so sure. Then again, he did donate a substantial amount of money in the last few days, so maybe he really is close enough to the campaign to act as a surrogate, especialy since he is being explicitly given as an example of someone from Silicon Valley who is supporting Trump.

It's a hard question - I'm not sure, personally.

"You cannot coherently oppose Trump and support Trump's political campaign."

Well this part I don't really agree with. A big part of democracy is coherently opposing other people's ideas, while not opposing their right to voice those ideas.

Let me make this even more fun for you: I have a real problem with what happened to Brendan Eich. From what I understand, there wasn't a major effort inside Mozilla to oust him --- he did not make his own employees feel uncomfortable. His relationship with Mozilla was employer/employee. His support for Prop 8 was quiet, and, painful as it is for us to recognize this now, very much in the American mainstream: Barack Obama ran in 2008 opposing marriage equality.

I'm curious - is your (and maciej's, if he's still following this thread) position that someone should refuse to associate with anyone who supports Trump? Take Graham and Altman out of the equation - assuming that this is not just a vendetta against YC partners (and the principle of charity compels me to assume that), would you apply this standard to other people you know? Do you have friends and business partners that support Trump, or buy products from Trump-supporting companies?

For me personally - I actually have relatively few people in my life that are Trump supporters. But this is mostly an accident of demographics - I went to an elite liberal arts college in what is literally the most liberal region of the country, I worked at Google, I live in the Bay Area, my mom's from NYC, and my dad's an immigrant. I have friends who have family that are hard-core Trump supporter, as well as family myself.

It would never occur to me to stop associating with them because of their political views, or the political views of their associates. They have their beliefs, I have mine, and we just don't discuss the subjects where we are diametrically opposed. We interact on the common ground that we do have.

According to my principles, the calls for YC to disavow Thiel or stop associating with him are obnoxious for the same reason I believe Trump is unfit to be president. They divide the world into "people like us" and "people against us", and then seek to build a wall between the two groups. If you believe that it should be "us and us" rather than "us vs them", then that includes reaching out to people with whom you disagree and finding the parts that you do agree on.

I understand why people think Maciej has a "vendetta" against YC, but I definitely do not. We considered joining YC's last summer session, after Altman generously invited us. I've recommended several startups to YC, over the objections of other friends to some of the same startups, and YC has made money as a result. I'm personal friends with both current and former YC partners, and numerous YC founders. I started a VC-funded startup in '99-'00 and worked for another VC-funded startup for 4 years after that, and attempted to raise money in '05: I am painfully aware of how abusive Silicon Valley was to tech founders prior to YC, and of all the work YC has done to remediate those abuses. I often feel like YC gets a bad rap. In fact: I even feel like Paul Graham often gets a bad rap.

But Paul Graham and Sam Altman are comprehensively wrong about Thiel, and I would be doing them no favors at all to pretend otherwise.

I'm Catholic. I come from an Irish Catholic family. I have at last count 13,492 first cousins. I do not know all the names of my aunts and uncles. But I do know that most of them are... "aggressively" pro-life. Some of them support Trump, because they feel a moral obligation to vote for whomever is going to appoint pro-life judges. I do not hold Trump support against my family.

Despite the fact that half of HN seems to think I'm a Republican, I am not. But I have plenty of Republican friends. Most of them have repudiated Trump and think he's a disaster for the party. But some of them believe in good faith that the cause of limited government is better served by Trump than by Hillary Clinton. I think they're gravely mistaken. But I don't hold that against them.

I'm fine with doing business with any of these people.

However, if you're in the audience at a Trump rally whooping and hollering your approval for Trump's claim that some women are too ugly to have been assaulted by him, I want nothing to do with you, at least until you've repudiated that disgusting notion.

If you're the person telling reporters that you're going to perform much-needed "racial profiling" at polling places on election day, to intimidate minorities from voting, I want nothing to do with you, at least until you've repudiated that disgusting notion.

If you're a billionaire who has stood on the largest imaginable stage and told the nation on live television that Donald Trump is the only honest candidate, and who donated $1.25MM to the Trump campaign after he threatened to jail his political opponent and started a national tour inciting white voters to distrust the votes of minorities in a rigged election, then you aren't a supporter of the Trump campaign. You are part of the Trump campaign. I want nothing to do with you.

Nobody who claims they'll "join the resistance" after Trump wins can coherently argue otherwise.

I don't demand that Altman and Graham sever ties in any formal way with Thiel. I don't know what that would entail or what's going on behind the scenes. But I do require them not to support Thiel publicly --- at least, if they're going to claim to be part of the resistance against Trump. You can't oppose Trump but defend the Trump campaign.

I like your thoughtful reply and agree with you, but want to point out that you are drawing somewhat arbitrary lines here on what is fine and what is not fine in supporting Trump. For example, wouldn't you agree that any of your cousins who support Trump -- the ones you are in good terms with now, if they had Thiel-money, they probably would have donated a million or two to him?

If I had a cousin who donated millions to Donald Trump, I assume we would not be on good terms afterwards. You've zeroed in on something implicit in my argument: yes, with escalating power in society comes escalating responsibility not to do harm.

Another way to look at it is: any cousin of mine hooting and hollering about black folks and "too-ugly" assault victims is no friend of mine, either.

> You've zeroed in on something implicit in my argument: yes, with escalating power in society comes escalating responsibility not to do harm.

So you're more a consequentialist than a deontologist, okay.

I'm very much not a consequentialist. Like I said, I'm Catholic. I'm about as deontological as you can get and still be a software developer.

Well, you're at least somewhat consequentialist because you've just said you'll judge a person differently depending on what means and resources are available to them. You're okay with your cousin supporting Trump (and giving his campaign a paltry $20USD donation?) but you're not okay with them if they were richer and were giving the campaign a $2M donation. Where am I misunderstanding you?

That someone with the means to donate $2MM necessarily has not only a better understanding of the harm they're doing, but also the responsibility to further their understanding. My hypothetical cousins might donate to Trump believing they're supporting a pro-life candidate, not realizing that Trump has probably paid for no small number of abortions himself. My nonexistent hypothetical billionaire cousin cannot claim to be ignorant to what Trump really is, especially if he's brought into the inner circle of the Trump campaign itself.

Thiel knows Trump is a horrible person. He donated $1.25MM the day after Trump made national news for campaigning on the illegitimacy of the election itself, and for claiming that the women accusing him were too ugly to have been assault victims.

What do you think Thiel's motivations are?

I'm struggling with understanding your position. It's okay for your cousins (or whomever) to be sympathetic to political leaders as long as they don't act on those sympathies? If I believe that Trump is the lesser of two evils, why is it inappropriate to donate my time and money to his campaign? And why should that support be held against me professionally while others support Hillary's campaign with impunity?

"Hooting and hollering" at offensive speech is different than deciding Trump represents a better option than Hillary and defeating her is worth spending millions of dollars.

And how should any of this be connected to one's professional opportunities?

Hillary's a bully and a crook, but I'll maintain relationships with anyone who votes for her. Trump is a terrible human being and a clown, but likewise I'll maintain relationships with people who vote for him. People who laugh at "she's too ugly to assault" I already don't speak to... independent of their political leanings.

These are difficult issues. I was among those who voted in the online poll for Brendan Eich's ouster, but eventually, after reading every opinion I could find and wrestling with the issue for some time, decided I had been wrong to do so.

There are some interesting parallels between the two cases. In Eich's case, one of the reasons I decided I had been too hasty was that I didn't see anyone accusing him of actual discriminatory behavior as Mozilla's CTO. Apparently he had done well at keeping his politics out of the workplace. That seemed to me an argument for granting him the same consideration.

I don't really understand Thiel's politics. Some of the things he complained about in his RNC speech I understand and agree with as issues, though I don't understand why he thinks Trump is likely to address them. (I do understand why he thinks Hillary is unlikely to, though.) I haven't read any of Thiel's political writings, except for one widely-commented-on piece [0]. He doesn't sound to me like a racist; I'm less sure he's not sexist but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that. His reasons for supporting Trump seem to be highly idiosyncratic. If he's just trying to make the point that there's danger in giving the Democrats too much power, well, I don't disagree with that, though I probably disagree on how much is too much. Anyway, the point is, just as in Eich's case, there seem to be mitigating factors.

Well. I don't know the answer, but I offer the following thoughts. It's easier to demonize someone you don't know personally. That in itself suggests that ostracism should be a weapon of last resort.

But I understand your anger. If I were in YC and Thiel offered to invest in my startup, I don't know whether I would take his money.

[0] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

As I've said elsewhere on the thread: I agree with you about Eich. I have no trouble drawing the line here between Eich and Thiel:

* Eich was ousted from a full-time job. Thiel is not an employee of YC.

* Eich's beliefs were well within the mainstream; Barack Obama campaigned in opposition to marriage equality.

* Eich's support for Prop 8 was quiet. It was mined out of a database and used against him. So far as I can see, he had not made any Mozilla employees uncomfortable. He didn't get on stage at the RNC and use his position at Mozilla to suggest that Silicon Valley opposed marriage equality.

* Eich's support for Prop 8 was relatively insignificant. In addition to being such an important Trump surrogate that his actions make the front page of CNN, Thiel donated millions and bundled millions more to the Trump campaign.

* For that matter, marriage equality is a substantially different issue than Trumpism. Trump believes Muslims, including US citizens, should be prevented from entering the US. He proposes a religious test for entry into the country. He believes his political opponents should be jailed. He is campaigning against the very legitimacy of the election he's running in. Trump is running against the very idea of equality of citizenship. You can't say all those things about the belief that LGBT people should be denied marriage rights --- in fact, you have pretty good evidence of the difference: thankfully, the cause of marriage equality crushed the cause of traditional marriage.

The campaign to oust Eich from his job at Mozilla was wrong. I didn't support it at the time and I don't support it now. I do not feel that way, even a little bit, about the call for Graham and Altman to live up to their own words about Trump.

Okay, I'm going to play devil's advocate for a minute.

* Eich was ousted from a full-time job. Thiel is not an employee of YC.

We don't normally consider CEOs to be the sort of person where we have to worry about their ability to find another job.

* Eich's beliefs were well within the mainstream; Barack Obama campaigned in opposition to marriage equality.

That's a difference of degree, and a smaller one than we would both prefer; Trump did manage to get nominated, after all. I don't think you can say (alas) that Trumpism is completely out of the mainstream in 2016.

* Eich's support for Prop 8 was quiet.

True, but does it really count for much?

* Eich's support for Prop 8 was relatively insignificant.

Another difference of degree. For all we know, Eich may have donated a larger fraction of his bank account than Thiel did.

* For that matter, marriage equality is a substantially different issue than Trumpism.

Marriage equality is one issue and Trump has raised many, that's true. But I think the attitudes in which Prop. 8 support was rooted, and those in which Trumpism is rooted, are essentially identical. For instance, a rearguard action against marriage equality is still being fought in Alabama, and I expect my relatives there are big supporters of both Roy Moore [0] and Trump. In fact it's interesting, now that I think of it, that Trump has not attacked gays; it would certainly play well with much of his audience. Maybe it says something about how far we've come, or maybe he's just too busy attacking Mexicans, Muslims, and women to bother with gays.

A better argument might be that Prop. 8 was just a return to the status quo ante, while Trumpism is an existential threat to the nation. Why a smart man like Peter Thiel can't see that is beyond me too. But I can see the argument that Thiel is not evil, just deluded.

(P.S. You're a brave man, using asterisks on HN :-)

[0] http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2016/10/lawyer_t...

Shifty of you to imply both that I can go jobless and potentially unhirable on short notice, and that the lowest possible four figure dollar amount might also be more of my liquid net worth than Thiel's donation is to his bank account balance. One or the other, not both!

I think we've had a loss of context here. I wasn't speaking against you; I was replying to Thomas's argument that the situation with YC and Thiel is fundamentally different from that with Mozilla and you.

Are you really going to tell me you think YC should dissociate from Thiel? I grant your point -- my argument had a bug -- but I would think you would support the spirit in which I offered it.

Anyway, since you're here in person, let me say to you directly: I'm sorry I signed that OkCupid petition.

Thanks. You know that Yagan and OkCupid were just going for the PR, playing with social media outrage fire.

IAC (Ok's parent co) was doing a deal with Mozilla, I'm pretty sure we could have backed them off, had I remained.

I can't say more right now, but I'll note that a headhunter linked-in-mailed me late in 2014 asking if I wanted to be CTO of Match/Ok/etc. -- the IAC dating services.

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/543545707152429056

Too funny!

That is a hoot.

It's not so much that Thiel is deluded.

What I think leaves many of us aghast is the entitlement and lack of empathy it takes for wealthy white men to not see what Trump and his supporters will and are doing to many of our friends and family. At this point they are willfully blind, but because it doesn't affect them personally, that makes it ok.

When Trump and/or his surrogates angrily scream that the election is being stolen (by black people), that black people voting is illegitimate, that it's ok to jail your political opponents, that the current president is illegitimate because he's black, or he didn't rape her because she's not hot enough, it makes it fundamentally not ok to support him. Romney or Bush really didn't make similar claims.

People who support Trump with speeches and money should be shunned.

> Trump believes Muslims, including US citizens, should be prevented from entering the US.

From Thiel's RNC speech: "Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East."

I am (please read this in dry english english), let us say, not exactly a fan of Mr. Trump.

On the other hand, I'm also ... not exactly a fan ... of bombing the crap out of a shit load of muslims either.

So I'm not honestly sure that one is necessarily as clear cut as it might be, given history.

I'm rooting for Hillary from my side of the pond because of, well, every single other reason you mention and a bunch of others too. But still. I think Thiel's wrong, but I think I can see how he logic-ed himself into his current position.

> Eich's support for Prop 8 was relatively insignificant.

So you will personally fail to condemn a disagreeable action as long as you judge it to be ineffective?

In other words, effective support for immoral ideas (in your view) is the objectionable thing?

I appreciate the charitable reading and will try to do likewise.

I see a significant difference between private political opinions (including their expression by voting), and a public political act like a convention keynote speech.

It's important in a pluralistic society that we live and work with people with very different political views. But Thiel doesn't just have his contrarian opinions, he is actively working to promote the candidacy of someone who is a threat to our basic democratic institutions.

To me that's a significant difference, and the reason it calls for a public and forceful response.

Hmm, interesting. So would it be acceptable if Graham & Altman were more vocal about their support for Clinton? To my mind, they've been pretty vocal already, between their Twitter feeds and published articles about how they sit around Sam Altman's dinner table and discuss ways to defeat Trump. I suspect that Paul Graham may also have donated > $1.25M to Clinton's campaign, based on his recent Tweet about the number of non-profits that could've been funded with the money he's spent defeating Trump. But you're right that this is not covered on the national stage the way Thiel's RNC convention speech or $1.25M donation have. (Much of this may also be because everything that Thiel does that could remotely be spun into the "power-broker behind the scenes, doing evil things" narrative tends to make the press, post-Gawker, which to be fair had much of the same ick-factor as this debate.)

To me, the right answer to bad speech is better speech. It's fine to disassociate from people if you dislike them - but there's a big difference between disliking them and disliking one position they hold, or even more tenuously, disliking the people they associate with. Most people associate with a lot of other people, and these networks grow ever bigger as you get older and more powerful. If you start disqualifying people based on the company they keep, the set of people that you actually like will get both ever-smaller and more monocultural. Some people like that - I suspect many Trump supporters wish the world could be divided into black & white-Christians-who-act-like-us - but I think you'd lose a lot in this.

I wonder if the difference between us is that you view what Thiel did as speech, where I see it as a major political act, that demands some kind of response.

I don't want Graham and Altman to be more vocal about Clinton, I want them to say something substantive about Thiel, and why (or whether) they are comfortable continuing to do business with him.

It's quite possible. I do view what Thiel did as speech. For that matter, I view much of what Trump says as speech - I don't believe he will follow through on any of it, if he is elected, and suspect that his first priority in office will be rewriting the tax laws to favor real estate developers and soak financiers. My biggest fear actually isn't what Trump will do as president, it's what his supporters will do once they realize they've been had.

Regardless if I agree or not I can understand your opinions about Thiel being free to support Trump politically. What I can't understand is why he should be able to continue his association with YC without even answering questions. YC supposedly uninvited supporters of SOPA from demo day, but when you're actively trying to elect someone to the highest office in the country you don't even have to explain what you mean? I don't really see how you can have a democratic society when people can't even be held accountable for fundamental things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com