The Pay-It-Forward Culture | Hacker News Reader

The Pay-It-Forward Culture

steveblank.com

79 pointswebsirnik25 comments

Open source fits "pay it forward" very well. I'm a little surprised that it wasn't mentioned.

I think that is because the introduction is set in the past, when open source wasn't on the horizon yet.

Open source was the rule rather than a choice in those days. Nobody would pay for source code that only ran on your hardware. It was only in the 80's that the closed source systems started to emerge.

"Nobody would pay for source code that only ran on your hardware."

Unless your hardware was a mainframe. IBM distributed quite a lot of code in source form, with the implied assurance that there were no cheap, alternative means to run it. OS/360 wasn't even copyrighted, which is why it's legal to run on today's PCs. IBM, without trying, and probably even without realizing it, was an early pioneer in the open source niche of this "Pay-It-Forward" culture.

"SHARE Inc. is a volunteer-run user group for IBM mainframe computers that was founded in 1955 by Los Angeles-area IBM 701 users. A major resource of SHARE from the beginning was the SHARE library. Originally, IBM's operating systems were distributed in source form and it was common for systems programmers to make small local additions or modifications and to exchange them with other users. The SHARE library and the process of distributed development it fostered was one of the major origins of open source software."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing)

In fact, the GPL is a legal enforcement of the concept. Unlike the common misconception, you're not obliged to give back your modifications to the original dev - you're obliged to pay it forward by giving your users the same rights you got.

(Whether this should be enforced legally is a different discussion, of course)

Given the number of attempted GPL violations I think that the answer is 'yes', it should be enforced legally.

Corporations would run roughshod over he rights of their users otherwise. The GPL is one of the most creative uses of the copyright system ever.

I like what the GPL is trying to achieve, but frankly I dislike the 'collateral damage'; blocking proprietary software from using it is fine, but it also blocks the non-copyleft licensed (MIT, BSD, Apache, etc) projects from benefiting from the code.

In the OSS/Free Software world, GPL takes and never "gives back". I'm not comfortable with that position.

It's too bad that startups exiting with boatload of cash don't pay it "backward" to open source project they extensively leveraged.

As someone who has only been in the software development culture for about two years, I can firmly say that it truly has some incredibly helpful people. People are always eager to help others (I.e. Stackoverflow, Lean startup circle, etc) and interestingly enough, humility is more common than one would expect from a group of absolute geniuses.

'The goal of the club was: “Give to help others"'

Why don't we see more companies with goals like this? The "avoid the negative" mottos are the popular thing in Silicon Valley these day (e.g. Google's "Don't be evil" and Facebook's "Don't be lame"). It seems to me that avoiding evil or lameness does very little to help you avoid other bad things.

A corporate motto like "Pay it Forward" or "Excite the Customer" or "Be Entrepreneurs" or "Hack for Good" seems like one that would benefit a company and the ecosystem it operates in much more.

I like Noise Bridge's guiding principle: "Be excellent to each other." (which is a quote from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure).

It's easier to unite people against an evil than it is to advance a good.

"They were the beginning of the Pay-It-Forward culture, the unspoken Valley culture that believes "I was helped when I started out and now it’s my turn to help others."

That's not how I interpret "pay it forward". I understood that to mean "I have done a good deed to you, now you do a good deed for someone else". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward

The examples given are about mentoring and cooperation. Different, but heart warming nonetheless.

Those are the same things no? If you were helped out then someone did a good deed to you, now you repay the favor by doing a good deed to someone else.

It's just 'out of phase' with respect to the starting point but otherwise perfectly equivalent. Like a co-sine wave looks just like a sine wave...

It's just 'out of phase'

It's the phase that makes it pay it _forward_ instead of backward. Obviously in every interaction, at most one of the actors can pay it forward.

I think it is just a viewpoint shift.

Whether you look at the two people that interact at one instant in time or at one person at two different points in their lives the chain remains the same.

I've had plenty of help in the past and I'm giving plenty of help in the present (as much as I can, which is still way too little). That means that for me the 'pay it forward' mechanism is a very real component of my life.

Those that are on the receiving end are not under any obligation, other than a moral one. And I'm pretty sure that for some of them the message is lost, but every now and then the spark lights a new flame.

Pay it forward is an asynchronous mechanism, whether it actually worked or not you can't even determine in most cases.

Those that are on the receiving end are not under any obligation, other than a moral one

But that's the point. To pay first, you are operating under faith that this is the right thing to do. To pay back after you have received is more like settling a moral debt. For some people taking that leap of faith- doing good before being guaranteed that there is something in it for them- is really hard. They have what I consider to be a narrow and limited view of their self-interest, and don't believe or understand that making the world better is in their self interest, if not obviously and directly so.

I think it is just a viewpoint shift.

It is, but that doesn't mean they're the same. Left and right are just a viewpoint shift (they are mirror images). Yet they are definitely distinct.

The way I see it they are the same. The concept consists of a transaction in two parts, one between Alice and Bob, and on between Bob and Charlie.

Part 1: Alice helps Bob, and in lieu of payment says "pay if forward".

Part 2: Bob helps Charlie, fulfilling his "debt" to Alice. If Charlie offers to pay Bob, and Bob says "pay it forward", this begins a second transaction.

If we look at the internal thoughts of Bob during Part 2, they may very well look like "I was helped when I started out and now it’s my turn to help others.".

The OP describes the same thing with one minor variant: instead of Alice or Bob explicitly stating "pay it forward" the general rules of their culture have a built-in, default structure of "pay forward any karmic[1] debt". It is pretty easy to envision that after enough explicit statements of "pay it forward" that the statement need not be uttered because it is understood at that point.

[1] In colloquial sense of the term karma.

From the article mentioned in the post: http://januarymagazine.com/features/minmicrochipexc.html

'He did not think that all these companies would succeed -- he filed his paperwork for several of them in shoe boxes that he kept in his closet -- but he strongly believed that by investing, he was doing his part, as he put it, to "restock the stream I've fished from."'

I'm surprised there's no attempt to reconcile the notions of: secrecy, competitive advantages and the corporate prime directive (to profit), with information sharing like in the Semi Conductor Fab example.

I'm definitely not coming down on the other side of "pay-it-forward" and Steve seems to invoke the "rising tide lifts all boats" idea with the Finland dinner story, but surely there's a moral imperative not to spill the company beans.

> surely there's a moral imperative not to spill the company beans.

Surely. And yet, you can't build something like Silicon Valley by erring on the side of not spilling the company beans. You can only do it by sharing information, which is also a moral imperative.

Fortunately, I've generally steered clear of that conflict myself, largely by having the good fortune to work for Silicon Valley companies that absorbed that ethic of openness. I've sometimes experienced that conflict, and in those cases I've usually kept mum about things that could have helped our competitors. Some of those things I still haven't talked about to this day, because keeping my word is very important to me. But I respect the decisions of other people who've chosen the opposite; I understand their reasoning, and it makes sense.

In Michigan there are two things that I have observed that are done differently in Ann Arbor that have made it the states startup center:

1. Strong support for entrepreneurs by the University of Michigan

2. A pay it forward culture

I think any city that has both has a fighting chance.

I can't think of a better place that exemplifies this than Hacker Dojo in Mountain View.

I had no idea Fairchild was the grandfather of so many companies.

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