I'm glad AOL has a sense of humor about this. But you can be sure that this incident will create additional requirements and restrictions for the [honest] entrepreneurs who still remain in the building.
I spent plenty of nights at the terminal and afternoons asleep on those couches; Eric's nighttime efforts will ensure that they wear evenly.
Eric: Welcome!
(AOL 1989-2001)
AOL is going to get press out of this that am sure they will find worth the few months of squatting.
Also, entrepreneurs break rules in order to get stuff done. I applaud Eric and look forward to seeing him do well in the future.
That's AOL's decision to make. Not yours, not his.
> Also, entrepreneurs break rules in order to get stuff done.
Unethical people engage in unethical behavior (which is sometimes "breaking rules") in order to get stuff done.
Plenty of entrepreneurs do business honestly, and I'd rather read about them. I don't need a news story to tell me that behaving unethically can provide gains at a cost to others.
What unethical behavior are you referring to, and how have you demonstrated that Apple's success not only stemmed from such behavior, but could have only occurred through unethical means?
This cost the phone companies and was an illegal item that they sold on the "underground market"
If Steve didn't partner with Wozniak would Apple be around today? Doubt it.
Was this more immoral then sleeping on AOLs couches for a few months after your incubator ended? I would say so.
"Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination." http://paulgraham.com/founders.html
It's fine to break unwritten rules of decorum, or question conventional wisdom. This is another thing all together.
2. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're a reasonable person, and you were merely exaggerating, but I don't even know what you're trying to say. Are you trying to say that in order to do great things, rules generally have to get broken...and therefore it's ok for entrepreneurs to do unethical things?
3. Consider reducing your consumption of entrepreneurship porn.
2) The world is rendered in shades of grey, and not all ethical issues carry equal weight. Some are worth sweating, some aren't. This one isn't, according to a representative of the victimized party itself.
3) Consider having a beer or two and giving the high horse a good night's sleep.
Many successful entrepreneurs engage in social hacking in some way. What the entrepreneur in this case did was both unethical and illegal.
Just because you have a key to someone's house doesn't mean you get to open their front door and sleep on their couch.
(since you apparently missed it the first time)
I see this fellow as no worse than, say, a telemarketer. In fact, that's probably a good analogy to draw... except that I typically get more annoyed at telemarketers who hijack my time and attention, than AOL management seems to be at the person who overstayed his welcome in their building.
It's possible that I'm only as sympathetic to him as I am because he committed his offense in the course of trying to create something. Telemarketers don't offend me because they're annoying and presumptuous, but because they're lazy and unnecessary. If every telemarketer dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, life would go on for the rest of us. If every kid with a bit of hustle and debatable judgment dropped off the face of the earth, things would go downhill in a hurry.
Now, you might think that building an education startup is not an end that requires or warrants trespassing, and you're probably right. However, I hope that you would feel differently about trespassing as a means to protect oneself from a dangerous oncoming storm.
I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but too often I hear people argue that if a certain means is immoral in one circumstance then it must be immoral in every circumstance. These people have the notion stuck in their heads that "the ends never justify the means." IMHO this viewpoint is far too reductionist to be universally valid.
The security staff in question was probably reprimanded for their failure to detect the interloper -- he abused the trust he had gained by previously becoming a "known" face.
You do what you have to do, ethically, to succeed.
They've actually been profiled as a reasonable company that invests in the future. How many people reading this article know AOL as "that company that first sent me discs in the mail" and previously thought AOL as a dead company?
AOL gets free, positive press showing that they're not dead, they're investing in the future, and that they're reasonable. The positive spin this article gives them is worth every penny of resources spent.
The best thing they can do at this point is put a positive spin on it, but ...
> The positive spin this article gives them is worth every penny of resources spent.
Not your decision to make for AOL. AOL will spin this, but post-facto justification ("see, it's not that bad -- they made good on my theft!") does not an ethical decision make.
I pointed out that it was my opinion that the cost of the resources that Eric used was less than the cost of genuine, positive press.
I also did not declare his actions ethical. I responded to your claim that AOL has been embarrassed.
AOL responded appropriately (not pressing charges, just kindly requiring him to not sleep/live there anymore), and was able to respond to the press inquiry with a lighthearted statement that fits the narrative of the article. The article presents AOL not only as having reasonable management, but also as a place to work with great benefits (food, showers, gym, startup incubators, friendly environment).
AOL is where Yahoo will be in 5 years: they have nowhere to go but up in terms of public reputation and mindshare.
Somebody abused their fairly standard SV corporate perks, they responded without bringing in the police.
At the end of the day, my subjective impression is that their startup interests brought in an immature, ethically-challenged entrepreneur who is stuck in the money-raising cycle, and accordingly AOL has been dragged into the press because of something stupid he did.
That isn't a particularly positive narrative, but I can see how people that are more comfortable with Eric's failure of ethics can see it as a cool story of "hustling" entrepreneurship.
By the way, all AOL has to do now is to chastise a bit the security people and to make sure the security rounds do cover the whole floor plan. Nothing more, nothing less. I hardly see that as suffering for the other startups in the building.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Sure, if one person does this, AOL is no worse off, but if everyone adopts this attitude, it will have an adverse effect.
I'm flabbergasted that you can applaud him for this. It's like a former bank employee stealing money from the vault, because someone forgot to take away his badge.
Maybe you are this upset because you fear it will affect you personally?
Though, companies like AOL or Google could totally make this a legit practice by asking for 2% or something of any startup that comes out of it.
So while AOL may not be worse off for having someone sleeping on their couch IN THIS CASE, you can bet that the hammer will come down on the rest of us in the building. From AOL's perspective, it could just as easily have been a homeless person with psychological issues. Honest entrepreneurs will suffer because of this.
It really couldn't have been a homeless person with psychological issues, he would have been noticed and likely wouldn't have made it into the initial incubator.
Anyway, it is more complicated than the arguments I have been witnessing here today and I just regret that I am not in good shape to give adequate voice to the idea that society needs to come up with a more enlightened means to address ..the whole kit and kaboodle.
On the other hand, an obviously talented young developer who is starving in Silicon Valley may need to take an internship that pays $80K+ per year.
I'm not seeing the parallels.
Let's say his aging mother died and he continued to cash her Social Security checks for a year, to continue to pursue his dream, would you consider it unethical? The federal government certainly has the money, and he is tenaciously pursuing his dream.
I agree with you that there are situations in which it's ethical to steal from someone who can afford it, but what parent said was that the latter condition doesn't guarantee it to be automatically ethical, implying that grandparent's assertion that the theft was ethical because AOL could afford it was fallacious.
The assumption the companies has is that the building is clear each night. Having a person there could be an issue simply if there is a fire or other event and emergency personnel involved. In no way can any responsible company tolerate this type of stowaway.
FWIW, from a firefighter's perspective, I can assure you that - in the event of a fire - the fire department does not assume a building is clear just because it's the middle of the night or whatever. There are any number of reasons why people could be inside at 2:00am, 3:00am, etc. Maintenance work being done, facilities people cleaning, cheating executives banging their mistresses on their desk, etc., etc. In the case of a working fire, a primary search is going to be done (conditions permitting) anyway.
In no way can any responsible company tolerate this type of stowaway.
You're probably right, but I don't really think the reasons this is true have much to do with emergency scenarios. If anything, I'd lean more towards "what if the elevator was being repaired late at night, and the stowaway fell into an elevator shaft and plunged to his death?" and any potential liability that might come out of that.
Thank's for pointing that out. In retrospect I can see how assumptions similar to the one that I made can cause plenty of errors in emergency situations.
"a primary search is going to be done (conditions permitting) anyway."
I watched a docudrama on the Reagan assassination attempt last night. One of the mistakes they made I believe was assuming Reagan wasn't hit by a bullet because a) he seemed fine and said he hadn't been hit and b) the secret service said he wasn't hit.
While "a" would seem to be pretty valid info "b" was based on "a". After all you can't really see whether a bullet hits someone generally. So in keeping with your "primary search" with fires, they shouldn't have "assumed" the info they were getting was correct and fully checked him out much earlier. (And in fact I'm sure that is probably they way they would operate in the future learning from that mistake.)
I imagine there are AOL employees that work late, too, or fall asleep on the company couch.