Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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If it were all that obvious, we wouldn't have so many abusive narcissists in positions of power. I'll leave politics aside, but just taking companies in the news this week, we can look at Adam Neumann and Travis Kalanick as narcissists who couldn't even get a company to IPO due to failures of collaboration and integrity.

The article correctly points out some of the direct economic damage. It ignores the significant damage to people done by abusive narcissists; from personal experience I can say it's substantial. You can see that in the interviews with WeWork employees.

But another kind of damage is what they prevent from existing. Kalanick was aggressive in killing competition; Lyft was the only one he couldn't spend into the grave. Neumann has deeply distorted the market for coworking. Or we could look at Zuckerberg [1]; what kind of open social networks could we have ended up with if he hadn't ruthlessly pursued a personally-dominated monopoly?

[1] http://www.afterpsychotherapy.com/narcissistic-personality-d...

Yeah, apparently it is not that obvious as on HN these 3 you named were worshipped here, negative/critical comments downvoted, while objectively the writing was on the wall. Wework being the most obvious to me personally; that was a shitshow from the start and yet people here actually believed that would succeed.

My favourite is when someone points out had bad these companies are, inevitably someone else links "the Dropbox thread" as justification. This is tremendously ironic, because Dropbox hasn't made a dime yet either.

Totally agreed. And I'd be much more comfortable if people here could split the two. E.g., "I'm not sure if that business will work, but I hope so because I just love Neumann; he's so magnetic, so compelling!"

But instead we get supposedly hyper-rational arguments that are pretty clearly highly emotional. And then when the wheels come off, the support just evaporates, with nary a "mea culpa", let alone a "here's how WeWork fooled me" post.

It's just exhausting sometimes.

> But another kind of damage is what they prevent from existing.

At least for VC-backed direct competition, nothing of value is lost. The business is commodity - driving people around in cars, delivering food, renting office space, offering rides on e-scooters, running under-the-table hotels, whatever. All that the insane amounts of VC enable is network effects and marketplace dominance - people don't call a pizza shop or a cab company any more, they open the Delivery Hero or Uber apps. But someone still has to make the pizza or drive the cab, which means until fully automated driving is reality, there is no direct loss in jobs.

The more interesting things are rather the "competition" that is entrenched companies... most obvious in taxis. Usually, taxis are regulated (meaning, their cars have appropriate insurance, silent alarm devices in case the driver gets robbed, and most importantly mandatory service areas and times). Uber/Lyft etc. can now pick the profitable cherries (airport transfers, drunk partygoers on Friday/Saturday) and leave the unprofitable times or areas to the regular cabs - who cannot run at an overall profit anymore as the business/hipster clientele is now using Uber/Lyft. Who suffers? Entire communities now underserved by taxis, old people (who don't have smartphones)... but no one really looks at which negative impact his/her company will have on minorities.

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