Mean People Fail
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Apple, Steve Jobs, widely known for being an asshole. Fucked over early employees.
Facebook, Zuck, completely fucked over his mates when money appeared.
Microsoft, Bill Gates, ruthlessly exterminated opposition and known for bullying staff.
Oracle, Larry Ellison
Zynga, Marcus Pincus, "I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues".
Uber, acting like complete dicks.
Kim Dotcom, nuff said.
I think once you've been mean/ruthless/evil in business you may come out the other side and do some nice things, but you have to ask, will it ever be enough? Will Bill Gates ever make up for the billions of damage he caused humanity by using underhand tactics to destroy his opposition? Maybe. But while everyone praises him at the moment, I can't help but think he deliberately held the internet back for 6 or 7 years for his own profit. You almost can't start calculating the damage he caused precisely because it is so mind boggling.
Perhaps you don't agree with me, but imho this is the most bizarre essay I've read by pg, and I really don't agree with most of his political leanings, so for me that's saying a lot.
The truly great startup founders have to be nice on the outside but when push comes to shove, complete assholes on the inside. And of course investors are going to see the nice side.
Edit: And it occurs to me, funnily enough pg seems to be one of the major counterexamples, a good founder, as when he setup YC it was a game changer because here was a rich dude taking time out to help a bunch of young people and then put his money where his mouth was when people started asking him "so where do we get this seed funding". It was so remarkable because he actually took the time.
Edit 2: There seems to be some debate on the meaning of "mean". I'd point to pg's own essay on philosophy to dismiss this sophistry. He uses "good" and "benevolent" as the opposites, not "polite" or "diplomatic". I also appreciate BG created trillions of value, so he's definitely an overall net +ve, but he destroyed as well as created.
First, the degree to which he "held back" the internet, when contrasted with what Microsoft did positively for home computing and the internet, is debatable.
Second, if Bill Gates can't be construed as a good person doing good things in the world-- as "not mean"-- then this debate is mostly pointless.
Fixed that for you. It's just business applies to legal business, not illegal anti-competitive tactics. Competition is beating the other guy, not preventing him from being able to play by locking him off the field. So no, it doesn't play a factor here, not at all.
Conflating morality with legality feels a bit easy to me. It's just not always true.
Anyone subject to NSA surveillance via Skype, Hotmail, Outlook.com etc. MSFT was the first company to participate in PRISM.
That would be Bill Gates mother. She was buddy buddy with IBM CEO and she was the one convincing them to go with Microsoft.
Dunno if it's accurate to say Gates destroyed his life. His main problems seems self inflicted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Criminal_investigati...
And he sold out a bunch of his colleagues:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/17/where-k...
The controversy around House of Coolness went beyond selling
access to a site that largely hosted other people's intellectual
property. Around 1993, House of Coolness was targeted by Günter
Freiherr von Gravenreuth, a German lawyer who made a career of
suing copyright infringers. But rather than face legal attacks
from Gravenreuth, associates of Schmitz tell me he instead began
supplying Gravenreuth with names of other figures in the bulletin
board scene involved with pirated content. According to the journalist
Lars Sobiraj of the German tech news site Gulli.com, Schmitz was
allegedly paid for every pirate bust he helped to facilitate. His
cooperation with Gravenreuth was also mentioned in a 1997 lecture at
a conference of the German hacker Chaos Computer Club by the group’s
former spokesperson Andy Muhler-Maguhn, who labelled him an "agent
provocateur" not to be trusted.German Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Werdegang https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...
Some parts translated:
In the nineties, he operated Mailboxes and Partylines and was known for logging and reading all traffic to gain knowledge about current weaknesses of software. During a house search "hundreds of faked credit- and phonecards" were found.
He later cooperated and gave a lot of the info he gathered to the police. He worked closely with Günther von Grevenreuth, a very well known - but not highly regarded - attorney in german hacker circles.
Now, I appreciate that this is a rather sketchy description for a decade, but don't ask people from that time about Dotcom and expect to hear praises. He's neither well-liked, nor to be relied on or trusted.
Dotcom also wrote: "I made mistakes when I was young and I paid the price. Steve Jobs was a hacker and Martha Stuart [sic] is doing well after her insider trading case. I think over a decade after all of this happened it should NOT be the dominating topic. I am 37 years old now, I am married, I have three adorable children with two more on the way (twin girls – yeah) and I know that I am not a bad person. I have grown and I have learned."
You'll meet a lot of persons that don't give something about that excuse, as the damage is done. That statement looks like he tries to get away like school bullies do, just that he didn't bully at school, but at a later stage.
What did he do to make those words ring true? (except getting kids and saying he's wiser?)
I did noticed the pattern: people which have very little empathy have batter chance to succeed as startup founders. Which means that they will inflict harm to other people without any remorse if that make business sense. And they will be extra nice to people with more money then them.
So being mean in order to promote your business is called "being ruthless", "growth hacking", "efficient manager", etc. Being mean without any reason is just stupid and, ... really really mean.
Also there are plenty of successful founders which do have a lot of empathy and they are successful.
Decisions have to be made sometimes. I'm not defending assholes, but it's amazing how perceptions can be skewed of people and their intents, especially when it comes to the decisions they make.
For the rest of us, it's pretty obvious that successful people are mean, for the most part. Here's a simple example: politicians.
Not that parent and grandparent are not good points; the hypothesis he presents is quite unlikely given the correlation between psycopathic traits and business leaders (particularly "turn around an unsuccessful enterprise" CEOs.)[1]
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dist...
It seems pg simply left something out of his essay : successful people are not mean outward, yet bastards who fuck over everyone who deals with them, or at the very least, they were willing to abandon anyone and take away all support at the drop of a hat. (So were, to be honest, those famous scientists from hundreds of years ago. You should read more about them)
Here's another correction to be made in pg's essay :
> It seems quite likely that most successful drug lords are mean.
Not at all. They're open, approachable, they laugh and make you feel good. They will help you out at the mere asking. And then, suddenly, they'll make working for them a condition of the relationship. I mean, I've only ever met one, and didn't realize it, but still.
There's another archetype personality he seems to be describing :
> Why? I think there are several reasons. One is that being mean makes you stupid.
Here he points out that most people, in fights, lose control of their calculating nature. That's true.
> Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them.
This is not niceness as such, but merely niceness as observed by others, in casual settings (ie. not long-term).
> The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money.
This is a very important attribute.
So let's see what we know about our startup founders :
1) There is a large difference between outward appearance and inner feelings/thoughts. Outwardly, they are attractive, nice and helpful.
2) They are able to keep control, and maintain composure and execute plans in the face of high emotions.
3) As the parent poster pointed out, they will backstab others, but only to great effect. This mostly means that they are able to plan conflicts ahead of time (when you see this, it's because they cause the conflicts), others don't see them coming (probably because getting into a conflict with them is impossible unless they plan it), and they nearly always win (they don't just plan, they plan well).
4) They are driven by some sort of external impulse that is not money, nor related things like family and the like, but some sort of abstract goal ("improve the world" but applied to a specific field. So their goal is to, make the products with the best UI, or make the best business software, or ...)
It could be what he intends by the word "mean" is more along the lines of petty and emotionally immature with aspects of small-minded vindictiveness. If so, I think what he is saying is true.
That style of "meanness" (think nasty little kid) is very difficult to hide and doesn't garner respect. Aggressive ruthlessness does unfortunately, at least among the types of people that are followers.
http://48laws-of-power.blogspot.com/2011/05/law-32-play-to-p...
Self-control is certainly required to win in business. Only stupid or mentally ill people would ever be overtly "mean" in a situation where they couldn't get away with it (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Linus, etc know they can get away with it)
Take for example the quality of empathy - It consists of 2 aspects :- 1.The intellectual ability to put oneself in others shoes. 2. Too feel emotional pity/sympathy when something bad happens to them. It is shown that empathy is a key aspect lacking in psychopaths. As PG points out - empathy helps us to navigate the social world. Hence, such people have difficulty handling social situations.
Steve Wozniak who is a genuinely nice person had a strong sense of empathy and was motivated by it to help others (eg:- giving significant portion of his own shares to someone who was shortchanged during Apple's IPO)
On the other hand Steve Jobs was what you would call a "highly functioning sociopath" - Someone who had strong emotional intelligence which could be used to great success in charming and manipulating people into doing one's bidding while at the same time, having an almost pathological inability to feel any sympathy for others or remorse for one's actions.(Take the same example where he refused to help out said employee or the time when he screwed over Woz). Unless I am mistaken, this aspect of Jobs's character is hinted at in Walter Isaac's biography of Steve. I believe this rare combination of both high emotional intelligence and cold ruthlessness was one of the key factors (among many others) in Steve Job's success. I don't want to over-exaggerate things or to imply that Jobs had absolutely no empathy (As a counter-example Jobs clearly loved his adoptive parents and felt great remorse over a relatively minor incident mentioned in the book) but he does seem to be an unusually mean person (much more than Bill Gate IMO).
You may not like how the man presents himself, but that is just flat out unfair.
No he will not and cannot. No amount of good deeds to people X makes up for destroying people Y.
I agree, this is a bizarre essay.
Your bar is very high. I hope you practice what you preach.
Personally, I think Bill Gates has been a net positive for the world.
That's exactly what will make you a better person. That's how it works.
> Change "apologize to 10 people" to "save 10 African children from starvation" and I don't see how you can possibly argue this hypothetical person is "bad"
Quite easily, let me fix your badly changed argument back to what it was, equal, because your change is an intellectually dishonest attempt to make the good outweigh the bad so much that it obscures my reasoning.
If I kill someone, and then save 10 African children from starvation, you're damn right I'm still a bad person. Helping people doesn't make up for hurting other people. Morals aren't math, doing good deeds doesn't balance some scale that makes the bad deeds go away.
> Your moral philosophy makes no sense.
It clearly makes far more sense than yours.
Then guy one will counter attack: You could just enslave a minority to make the majority happy!
Then guy two will make his counter: You could have everyone respect everyone to death while everyone is miserable!
...and so it goes on and on. A nasty syndrome. A classic case of Kant vs Mill. There will be no rest tonight.
I'm not super familiar with his work, but I've heard the popular guy these days is Rawls and his theory of justice. Maybe give him a look?
I wasn't using the "save 10 children" to obscure your reasoning, I was pointing out an extreme case where your reasoning breaks down. You can reasonably call someone who punches you in the face (without good reason) a "bad person". But if you find out they've personally saved 10 children's lives I'm pretty sure you'd think they were a good person. Plus what people mean when they call someone "moral" or "immoral" usually has to do with both their actions and their predicted future actions. Again, most people are fine with calling a reformed thief "moral" under certain conditions, even if they've never personally repaid the specific people they've wronged, because they don't seem likely to be immoral in the future. If you are not willing to do this you are in the minority. Your example is dishonest because murdering someone generally indicates a lack of self control or level of sociopathy that makes future violence incredibly likely. Also murdering someone purely because you don't like them very much or you have something to gain from it is generally seen as more evil than saving a life is good. If someone murdered in cold blood and then went on to save every starving person in the world, then they are also-fucking-lutley a good person. You might want to keep a watch on them, but that seems like a pretty strong indication their murderin days are behind them, and is way more than enough to make up for it.
No you weren't, you were setting up a straw man that you could easily known down, nothing more.
> Morals sure as hell are math, just like everything else.
No they aren't.
> If someone murdered in cold blood and then went on to save every starving person in the world, then they are also-fucking-lutley a good person.
No they aren't. They're a bad person trying to make themselves feel better by making up for their crimes. They don't ever become a good person after murdering someone. That line cannot be uncrossed.
Markets appear to aggressively favour so-called winners who aren't notable for civility or decency.
Gates 2.0 is tangential to the argument, because to some extent 2.0 is the creation of Melinda and a supporting PR machine.
Gates 1.0 was a borderline sociopath who did a huge amount of damage to personal computing. At the very least MS held back OS innovation by about a decade or so, and also wasted huge amounts of time and money by forcing IE on the Internet, and also became notorious for killing promising start-ups.
And yet MS was a hugely successful company.
So PG is factually wrong. Markets, investors, and business culture don't just tolerate meanness, they actively reward it, and actively punish its opposite. (Go on - think of a corporation which is known globally from board level down for its outstanding ethics, its intolerance of exploitation, and its generosity. Now - what percentage of successful corporations has that reputation?)
So I have no idea what the point of this essay is.
FWIW I think PG's lucid prose style should be taught in schools as an excellent example of how to write persuasive essays.
But I guess most people here understand the difference between persuasive stylings and factual correctness.
I'm not seeing much of the latter here. (Unless PG means people aren't mean to him? Which is possible, I guess - founders will generally not be nasty to the dude with the money.)
If I punch you in the face and then
apologize to 10 other people for
hitting you, it doesn't make me a
good person nor have I in any way
made up for wronging you.
But maybe we're just getting into the semantics of what it means to "make up for" or "excuse" wrongs.
Completely irrelevant to the points being made. No one is denying that.
How many more people are employed in, say, southeast Asia doing MS support work and development than were "destroyed" in Microsoft's heyday?
Also, what is "destroyed" to you?
The balance is well in favor of Mr. Gates.
EDIT:
Sure, sure, downvote away. It's my understanding that, for example, Thailand employs a large number of developers on Windows platforms and technologies.
The first is the use of the word "retarded" to mean "something I disagree with". The word itself is nearly a slur, but if that was all it was I wouldn't downvote just on that. The problem is your conflation of disagreement with stupidity. People can disagree without either one of them being stupid.
The second reason is because you're making assertions to the contrary (of the post you're replying to) without really making any reasonable argument in favor of your own position. It just adds nothing to the conversation. In fact, your own post begs a question: how many people ARE employed in SE Asia doing MS support work? What do you know about those people and their lives?
Morality isn't math, good deeds don't excuse bad deeds simply by outnumbering them. The very foundation of your thinking is flawed.
Nice usually means you are a pushover and will go out of your way to make other people happy.
I've seen lots of nice people try to start businesses..what usually ends up happening is that someone more aggressive (IE: mean) comes around and either puts them out of business or pushes their way in to take it over.
The successful ones are the ones that pushed back or were aggressive in the first place. It's not just a rule in business, it's a rule in life. If you are too nice, eventually someone will take advantage of you.
Wow. Maybe I'm just cynical, but nice, to me, means being fair, and generally employing The Golden Rule.
I've been at forks in the road many times in my business career. I always took the fork that allowed me to sleep, which meant I applied The Golden Rule. I have employees that have worked for me for 20+ years and they seem to like me.
I have no doubt that if I were a dick I could be more successful, but the cost of that would be too great for me.
On the left is a [edit: ethicial, i.e. not based on insider info, or other motivations that most people would think of as "cheating"] choice that you think will lead to more success for your business and more certainty of keeping your employees employed and maybe even hiring more. As a consequence, your competitors may lose some business and have to lay off some employees.
On the right is a choice that you think will not benefit your business, maybe this choice is just doing nothing, carrying on as before. Your competitors are unharmed, nobody is laid off, but maybe your business will not be able to hire anyone new this year.
Which choice "applies the golden rule." If this scenario isn't representative of what you are talking about, I apoligize; I am not trying to find any fault in what you are saying, just trying to clarify what you mean by what "allows you to sleep."
I had a business relationship (he was an investor in my company) with Henry Burkhardt III [1]. He was, by anyone's definition, a serial entrepreneur. Very rich. Very successful. The following example comes from watching him.
The setup: you and other shareholders control the board. Do you: 1) use your position to dramatically dilute less powerful founders and employees, or 2) be fair and keep their relative percentages commensurate with their contribution and value?
Henry famously did #2 repeatedly. I don't have the stomach for it, so I've chosen #2. If my company is acquired, it will mean quite a lot less for me (and some other people). Is that stupid? Henry would've said yes.
To give you an idea of his ethics, see [2].
And, let me be clear: the people that Henry diluted were key to his success, it's just that he didn't need them anymore. Once the invention was made or code was written, their importance could be minimized without doing harm to the business.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Burkhardt_III [2] https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr14895.txt
I've worked for many companies, large and small, and it's the same. You can be the nice person, but eventually someone will come along and use politics against you (or give you unfair work loads, etc). You also won't get nearly as many raises (because nice people generally don't ask for raises), which means less for yourself and your family.
I run a few meetup groups. I was out of the country for a few months during the summer and the co-organizer (who is very nice) ran one of the groups. More aggressive people basically took over the group and nearly ruined it.
It's human nature. When you are nice, a more aggressive person will try to control you, your actions, or your situation because they see it as a weakness. If this doesn't happen, it's by pure luck.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about being unethical. I'm just saying that fair and nice are mutually exclusive over any given amount of time. The reason is because someone will disagree with you at some point and perceive you as an "asshole" and sometimes you need to be an asshole to not get trampled over.
My experience tells me I have to disagree with you. You can be fair and firm. I've had people try and walk over me in the past. I always respond the same way: keep emotion out of it, firmly respond in a logical way to their demand. I tell them "no, you can have/do X" and explain why.
The situation where this will not work: trolls. Public figures attract trolls and dealing with them is a completely different matter. But, in a work environment, I've never had a situation that couldn't be handled in a nice but firm way.
Now I just tell people up front that I am a honest person and will keep my word to my death, but will respond to underhanded tactics with naked violence, and they can get me arrested and/or sue me iff they survive the beating (I don't much believe in weapons either, this sort of thing should be visceral and primitive).
It works surprisingly well, I suspect it's because most people who hear that think I'm kidding but have a nagging suspicion that I'm not (For the record, I am a pacifist: the last time I started a fight I was 9 years old; the last time I ended a fight was earlier this year)
I say this as someone who allowed two homeless people to move in with me and paid for their rehab, for the record - "nice" means "thinking the best of people", not "being a doormat".
Some times you have to act larger than life, good or bad, to be taken seriously.
If you reach the point where physical violence is your only resort, let me promise you that, in a business environment, punching somebody is only making your personal situation much, much worse. I have been in enough street fights as an adult to recognize that they are a spectacularly risky behavior with zero upside. And are a strong indicator of something being really off in your brain. If you're really conducting yourself in this fashion, and not just barking on the internet, people will hear about it and you will get permanently crossed off lists you didn't even know existed.
Don't beat people up, or threaten to beat people up, over business deals. Ever.
It speaks to the reptilian brain, and unfortunately, it's all some people (especially "mean people") listen to - which is my main point here.
That said, I have two close friends whose relationship I started with by being punched in the face and punching back. A punch is communication, sometimes (I would argue that a knife lunge, or a bullet, are not - they have permanent consequences).
We are humans. Humans, especially men, have an instinct for violence. If you can let it out by knuckles, and go home with just a black eye - it's a lot better than letting things fester and escalate, and up stabbed, shot, or having your life ruined by a bureaucracy.
Like I said, I'm a honest person. I've spent six months designing a critical part of a power plant on a handshake. I've had the pleasure of dealing with people who've done stuff like that on a much larger scale (think oilfields).
I just never again want to deal with people who think that they're better than their word.
As far as blacklists go... they're for other people. The space around me? Blacklist free zone. I've let two meth junkies into my home, live there for a year, put them through what rehab I could manage. One is clean and back in school, the other is mostly clean and working (min wage, but better than nothing). They had been "blacklisted" by a good chunk of society (yay being trans, eh), even by their own families. I don't do blacklists. And I don't let others do it to me. (You know the "rejection rejection letter" joke that floats around? I've done something like that once. It was fun and a bit of science got done because of it.)
How do I enforce this? With my hands and with my head, same as everyone else. They're the greatest weapons in the universe, BECAUSE they're the opposite of weapons 99% of the time, it's what you make stuff with.
Maybe I'm telling the truth and maybe I'm just being an internet tough guy. If you care to know, do science to it, think.
What do you think you're doing if not threatening to beat them up? I wouldn't tell you anything in response but I'd try and get out of a business relationship with you ASAP. It makes you sound unstable, unpredictable, not worth it.
What good would that do to the discussion, though? Read, think, make up your mind, beware echo chambers.
If you think I'm unpredictable, thank you!
If you think I'm unstable and not worth it, it's your right to. My track record should speak for itself for those who know me, and for those who don't, I'm just one more random poster on a forum.
I do have one attribute, though. I can say "no" to someone who tries to intimidate me. The worst relationships are those with a threat on the table you're not quite sure about. I'd rather call the threat in and deal with the consequences than live with a sword hanging over my neck. Life is too short for that crap.
To me, honesty remains the best policy. Even if not for me particularly, a society that believes that is more robust, and well, lead by example.
"I'm self employed now, so take the following with a grain sf salt - it worked for me though. When I was dealing with HR, I made sure to growl a lot while talking, and stand in front of the only exit. There's a kind of sociopath that will only act with some consideration if they realize that their skeletal integrity is at risk, because they're the sort of people who would do that to others if given the chance. I don't beat up people at random, but you can bet that at least some sociopaths would if they thought they could get away with it - use it against them. Not to mean that all HR folks are sociopath, but you do get quite a few."
Again I say, pump the brakes, internet tough guy. Who would do this to an HR lady? Who would need to?
You have a real boner for physical violence and intimidation-- I didn't have to dig for hours to find you saying something else crazy. Believe it or not, there exist a variety of socially acceptable outlets to get your ya-ya's out against trained opponents your own size. I think (after giving you the benefit of the doubt on not just being a bullying thug, which is how you come off) you'd enjoy it quite a lot, and get an outlet for this aggression that isn't setting you back in your career.
Seriously. Try a boxing gym. Boxing is very underrated these days. Worked wonders for me, back when I was getting in lots of fights.
Be well man. You got some demons chasing you.
If you think I have an overarching point with how to deal with sociopaths, please address it. If you don't, heh, thanks for the safety/health advice.
Who would try to appear intimidating to a HR lady? Got me. Who would try to appear intimidating to a HR guy who thought because he could get you in trouble with the boss, you had to tell him "you are right" when in fact he was wrong? Me, as often as necessary. There's right and there's wrong and it never matters who says what, if it's true it's true, if it's false it's false.
People who think might makes right, need to be reminded that the logical consequence of that thinking is "I'm bigger than you". Sometimes the reminder has to be very direct. I abhor that philosophy, but if it's the only way I have to relate to someone because they endorse it, so be it.
And no, I don't have much of a boner for anything. Like I said, I take great pride in being honest and generous. I'm just sick and tired of people acting like everyone but them is disposable, and getting away of it because they can work the system.
You know what worries me? I say "So, I spent a year of my life getting two people off meth" and nobody cares (Yeah, maybe I'm making that up to look better. Maybe I'm not. Make a decision). I say "I am not against punching the deserving in the face when warranted" and people think that's scary. What's scary is that nobody gives enough of a damn to risk bruises. I have tried to, in my small way. If more people did - we'd see more fistfights and less shootings, police abuse, civil right violations and so on, I think.
1) Try really hard not to be one. This is by far the most important point. You can't please all the people all the time, but really push yourself hard not to be toxic to the people around you. Physical intimidation and violence is extremely toxic behavior, which is the root of our discussion. Don't do it.
2) When faced with toxic people, get rid of them in the most permanent and expeditious manner possible. Rarely will open confrontation be your strategy of choice here. You escalate things and you find yourself with a beef taking up space in your brain and theirs, and, most importantly, jack shit to show for it. You get nothing but damage. That's a bad deal.
If you need a rule of thumb, it should be smile and walk away. Fast. Shitty boss? Smile and walk away. HR troll? Smile and walk away. Dead weight cofounder? Smile and walk away. Bad business deal? Smile and walk away.
Don't try to fix them, don't try to teach them a lesson, stay nice and get out. It might sting for a second, but over the long term I promise it will be to your benefit. I have done it both ways and my results have been conclusive. Don't snag yourself on the sunk cost fallacy. Get. Out.
What would have been the results if they had been nice instead? Perhaps they wouldn't have been nearly as profitable or perhaps revolutionary products never would have existed because they wouldn't have had the drive to push people to their limits to create something great.
On the other hand they could very well have done just fine and been more successful but what they do know is what worked for the people before them was working for them so there's no reason to stop doing it.
Irrelevant, if you can agree they were mean then it refutes PG's article. I agree with the parent. I also agree with part of PG's article, fights are often won by out thinking your opponent, transcending the moment to paraphrase PG. Sometimes the little guy does win, perhaps more often than we often recognize.
Because there are several first hand reports from employees about Gates' meanness ("That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard"). Woz said himself how he had to give part of his equity to the employees Jobs screwed over. The whole Uber PR debacle has been going on for months. Zuck's money fight with Saverin is well reported in his gchats. Same thing with the Snapchat guys. And so on...
Anyway, I think this is a poor article simply because it seems to depict people as being in extremes (you're either black or white), as if a "good person" won't do mean things and vice versa. There's an old saying that goes something like "the opportunity makes the thief".
There's no point in arguing though. People will continue to believe what they want to believe regardless of truth or evidence. (e.g. http://www.newsweek.com/why-we-believe-lies-even-when-we-lea...)
That's a general principle, I don't know about the particular cases you allude to.
If we are to assume that pg is in fact correct in his conclusion, then what are the examples (data points) that would bring one to this conclusion?
My view of Zuckerberg being mean comes from personal experience. Zuck was not that mean, nothing like Walter Isaacson's description of Jobs. But at the time (years ago), he was probably 90th percentile in terms of meanness of the people I have known. He could sneak in barbs and be quite disdainful to people who he viewed as less than him (in one case shouting a person down and calling them stupid).
In a previous comment, you wrote that "but it's a mistake to believe you know someone based on a collection of sensationalized stories." This is correct. But is there any evidence that the stories about Jobs or Bill Gates were sensationalized? "Sensationalized" is the operative word. If the stories are true, then the person is in fact mean, and it is a mistake to view them as not mean, simply because they are always nice around you.
In other words, people are complex, but public opinion is not.
Personally, I don't believe that it's a useful distinction to classify a person as "mean" or "nice". Actions may be mean. A person commits so many actions that how could any person possibly understand and tally up all of them?
For sure, few in history have ever deserved such a binary distinction: Everyone mortal has made mistakes in their life, carried regrets, and so on.
However that itself puts into scrutiny what the point of Paul's piece even really is -- if that piece were randomly posted by some nobody, I would honestly have assumed that it was a passive-aggressive retort to someone who they felt wronged by. But instead it's actually a genuine claim that so-called mean people don't succeed. That is absurd. Again, there is a strong, demonstrated, studied correlation between success/entrepreneurial efforts and sociopathic, and even psychopathic, tendencies. To just outright claim that no, only good people succeed, is simply outrageous.
The claim "people who are mean (by the YC partners' standards) to the YC partners or in their presence are unlikely to succeed in YC or the scene which has emerged around it" is a bit more reasonable.
It's not so much that pg has tunnel vision as it is that every founder has tunnel vision for YC's money and the smart ones structure their interactions with the moneyholders appropriately.
But I also think that most of the comments on this article are specious as well. It's silly to argue about whether Bill Gates is naughty or nice - you will never agree, and the comments you get say more about the worldviews and experiences of the people commenting than about Bill Gates.
I was once talking to a psychologist I know about corporate CEOs, and she said that there've been meta-analyses done in the psychological literature about what traits make a good leader. And what they found is that across the whole body of the field, 1000s of studies, there was zero correlation between any personality trait and leadership. What they did find, however, was that there was a strong correlation between the personality traits possessed by the study's author and the personality traits they found in the leaders they studied. In other words, everybody saw themselves in leaders. Smart people looked at famous figures and said "They're all of above-average IQ", ignoring the counterexamples that are really quite dumb. Determined people looked at leaders and said "They're all really determined", ignoring the ones that lucked into their positions. Folks who were afraid to take a leadership position projected their inadequacies onto leaders and claimed they were lucky, or sociopathic, or had other reasons why they themselves would never want the position.
Worth keeping in mind when you're reading essays on the Internet about what makes a good founder, or, for that matter, if you're an investor trying to pick out good founders to back. If you're that founder, well, the only trait that all leaders share is that they got someone to follow them.
You've spun a pretty broad claim out of a conversation you had. Yet you can find countless studies on the personality traits of leadership. This isn't just people projecting their inadequacies, but instead is educated people trying to figure out what makes the social hierarchy of our society work.
Knowing how people rise in the ranks, and how cult of personality figures gain their powers, is of obvious importance. And a pretty consistent finding is that negative personality traits -- primarily the willingness to use and discard others -- is highly advantageous in such situations.
And it's obvious certain personality traits benefit both the striving for leadership, and entrepreneurial efforts. For instance a pretty common startup thing is claiming broad innovations when there is, really, none -- when you shamelessly claim wizardry, it gets you press and mentions and from that success, even if the root of your accomplishment is absolutely banal. Most of us have an internal voice that says "eh...sure most people will fall for it, but other people might look down on us" and will add disclaimers on our claims. No one wants to talk about that.
For that to be true, you need to point to a study that shows that the founders of highly successful tech startups - including the ones YC has funded like Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe - tend to be sociopaths.
In fact, probably the only people in the world who have the hard data to find such a correlation are the psrtners of YC; the success of their organisation relies on it. Aside from being incorrect, it would be counter to the commercial interests of YC to write this essay if it were false.
To my knowledge, the research you're referring to is based on large bureaucratic corporations like banks, in which it pays better to be a shrewd political operative than a skilled practitioner of a craft and a hard-nosed-but-ultimately-well-intentioned innovator and leader.
But as this and many other PG writings explain, modern startup culture, at its best, embodies a transition away from that kind of corporate culture.
With that in mind, even if it were true that people like Gates and Jobs did mean things 20-30 years ago, it doesn't mean it's the optimal way to be in the startup world of today and the foreseeable future.
I have no stake in this argument, but this tactic is kind of weak. "I would argue with you, but you suffer from a cognitive bias that makes you irrational (which, by the way, I do not)."
That might even be true, but you can't accuse someone of being irrational before they've actually done it.
Someone could just as easily accuse you of being blind to the evidence that goes against your own anecdotes and personal experiences. In other words, your personal experiences of these people could be positive but not represent other parts of their character that you haven't seen.
(For what it's worth, I think that a "mean people" / "good people" dichotomy is far too reductive to actually have any meaningful conversation about).
If it makes you feel any better, I'm mostly criticizing myself for engaging in a pointless and unwinnable debate :)
Personally I think in any situation where a company strategically outmaneuvers another company it is going to come off somewhat as mean (e.g. Microsoft in the 90s protecting their turf). The idea that a company/person succeeds because they are mean, however, is far too simplistic.
"Sue didn't work as hard as me"
"Bobby isn't the idea man"
"I don't owe Claire anything, she took 2 days off sick last year"
"Carl's only a contractor, I can pay him 2 months late"
"Jay only contributed a tiny amount at the beginning, now he does nothing, it's time to cut him loose"
"Sally just isn't a cultural fit any more"
Or simply "I worked so much harder/am brighter/deserve it more than most people, I'm allowed to be a bit selfish".
It's the same thing as power being corrupting.
And as I've said in my edit, why does he use "good" and "benevolent" as antonyms instead of "polite" or "diplomatic"? Why "x-ray vision for character"? "they're usually trying to improve the world"? "you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things"? "People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen."?
pg was clearly not talking about name throwing or spite. He's talking about moral character. He is repeatedly making positive judgements about how great these founders are. Not how they don't belittle other people for kicks.
Note: edited to remove identifying information.
I've edited my comment to remove identifying information because I don't feel like getting into more detail, and I agree that anonymous character attacks on the Internet are not that helpful.
Actually, telling it might be fine. Believing it, not so much.
I know how fashionable it is to hate on <company>, but is this what it's come to? An unsubstantiated story about how someone felt "vibes"? When the CEO didn't actually do anything?
Judge a person not by how they treat their superiors (Jessica, Paul) but how they treat those weaker than them, or those who can't do anything for them.
You are happy to take Paul's intuitions as data, but the intuitions of real people NOT in a position of power, who interacted with this guy in a place where he will show his true colors, you will dismiss.
This describes 96% of my interactions with all people, everywhere. It's nice that there is the other 4%, but they're not important in daily life.
If that surprises you, you may still be a young person who hasn't learned to see past the routine, reflexive veneer of niceness the 96% erect. Or I may be tragically cynical. But either way, once you adjust your expectations accordingly, disappointment and shock become less of a useless distraction.
On the other hand, a personal first hand account on how BG was a super nice guy would be a lot less relevant in my opinion.
You're right though that it comes down to definitions. I think the prevailing definition here is some closer to villain.
If you've never been on the other side of the news, you may not understand the difference.
You have a double standard: You certainly won't be coming to the defense of alleged misogynists and sexual harassment, for example, with cries of "but you don't really know the person" and talk of "fictionalized characterizations".
At the same time, I know it's pointless to argue with people who already know the answer, so I'm probably wasting my time.
Because it is widely perceived as socially indefensible and because of YC's support for women in particular.
Perhaps it is an unfair to apply these generalizations to you, however I seriously doubt you (or any public figure) would depart from them.
Nonetheless, the point was more general: Obviously you form opinions of people without knowing them personally.
> In this particular case I commented because I have direct experience with some of the people being discussed and am familiar with the ways in which the popular group-think diverges from reality for this group.
I pointed out that your experience may not be informative because of the particular power relations of your interactions. I think that is a fair observation.
This group is ill-informed, has poor reasoning skills and poor judgement. That doesn't have any bearing on the question of whether successful people are more likely to be sociopaths.
> I know it's pointless to argue with people who already know the answer
You could apply the statement equally well to yourself.
My purpose in all of this is not to "prove" that these are all nice people, but simply to point that you are all speaking with great confidence about the characters of people that you really know nothing about.
It's not right when people unjustifiably get socially lynched by the mob and it happens often. However, many successful people really are sociopaths --- which might be expected from a person who puts success before anything else --- and I don't think anyone ought to give up forming opinions on anyone else just because the mob often gets it wrong or because we don't know every detail of the lives of the accused. If that weren't the case then we couldn't pass judgement on many of the people we "obviously" want to (despots, etc).
(And disagreement, in particular defending tech executives, is not socially indefensible, defending sexism is).
You will be astonished at how different the two can be.
Nobody here is saying the YC and VC community are all evil super-villians. But as PG's essay and your views here indicate, there may be a startlingly shallow understanding of the nuances of human behavior in the YC community as a whole.
Techies such as ourselves tend to be very optimistic and trusting people. We always give our friends the benefit of the doubt when we can. But you and PG are seemingly taking this way, way too far in spite of mountains of contrary evidence (and I'm talking evolutionary biology, not just anecdotal).
Humans are primates who form status hierarchies and ruthlessly enforce them via any means necessary. This includes power asymmetry, extortion, bribery, status signaling, and a whole host of others nasty behaviors (watch Game of Thrones for the full gamut). That PG and yourself apparently deny this basic biological fact for a certain group (i.e. YC founders) does not make it less true.
I have to disclaim here that I'm a huge fan of yours Paul, and I know much about the incredible struggles you've faced in life. I know the only way to move forward is to be relentlessly positive, and this is also my own personal philosophy. However, part of being a rational person is trying to see the empirical world for what it is, not what we want it to be. I think this is the only thing PG is guilty of; He wants founders to be above average in altruism, when the reality may be the opposite.
All the best, and forever a fan.
If Uber, as a company, strikes you as "not mean", you're delusional.
One of the big arguments for Uber being mean, is that they recruited drivers from competitors. The goal there was to help extend an economic opportunity (the alleged benefit of capitalism) to more private contractors. We complain when large tech companies collude to keep salaries down, and I embrace companies who work to counter that. The fact that Uber appears to be doing that for tens of thousands of people every week puts them in the "not mean" category for me.
It's very possible that we have different criteria for what is mean or not mean. I'm basing mine on the facts I have, rather than sensationalist reports from blogs masquerading as real journalism (the fact that obvious hit piece have been written about Uber doesn't put them in the "mean" category for me, although it makes me wonder about their competitors who would do that). I haven't seen Uber playing dirty in the press, with their riders or with their drivers. They seem to genuinely be making the world a better place, with a focus on helping both sides of their marketplace. That said, I'm open to other points of view. Am I missing something?
We've managed to set up our civilization such that improving the world is usually the best way to gain power and wealth. While the ancients may have gone in for conquest and pillage, now the best way to make it big is to figure out how to give people what they want in a way that nobody else has done before. But that doesn't mean that the people working within this arrangement are good people.
My only hope is that uber doesn't take down too many innocent bystanders as it steamrolls taxi industries across the world.
Unfortunately it's not in uber's, as a business, best interest to give two fucks about innocent bystanders (I think, -we'll see how the "nicer" new taxi company replacements do over the next decade).
There are hundreds of reports from colleagues, family, friends about the characters of each of these people. They are completely different.
There is video evidence confirming these judgement. There is video evidence of Woz going around being a pretty sweet guy. There is video evidence of Jobs berating people and being mean.
Should we--the unconnected public--pretend that we can't know anything about these people just because we haven't met them?
It's not true that you have to know someone personally to judge their character.
We, the masses, don't judge people by how they treat their friends, superiors, or other rich, connected, powerful people (like you).
We judge them by how they treat the little people.
Being mean is like being trustworthy. Sometimes it only takes one sufficiently mean act to become a mean person--especially if that mean act is toward a little person who can't do anything to fight back.
You're a modern aristocrat, Paul, whether you like it or not. Not every aristocrat is abusive but one trend throughout history is that the kind aristocrats usually protect the evil ones. The servants know the difference. The nice aristocrats are ignorant. The mean artistocrats pull the wool over the eyes of the nice ones. If the servants complain about the mean ones, the nice ones side with the mean ones. Class solidarity, willful ignorance, or both?
I am very sure this is what is happening in Paul Graham's case, and likely yours too. You are apologizing for the cruel aristocrats because they don't show you their true colors.
To me being mean is to inflict harm on others without any personal gain, just for the sake of harming.
That said most of your examples were indeed harmful but also had a clear personal or corporate goal, which in my eyes makes them not-mean (I'm not talking about ones you didn't give any example, since it's hard to discuss them).
Yes, Steve Jobs was very mean sometimes. But he also knew how to praise, he also knew how to identify and motivate talent.
And of course, it's one thing to be a startup founder, another one to begin seeing money in the bank. That changes things usually.
"Studies conducted by forensic psychologist Robert Hare indicate that about 1 percent of the general population can be categorized as psychopathic, but the prevalence rate in the financial services industry is 10 percent.
These "financial psychopaths" generally lack empathy and interest in what other people feel or think. At the same time, they display an abundance of charm, charisma, intelligence, credentials, an unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation, and a drive for thrill seeking.
A financial psychopath can present as a perfect well-rounded job candidate, CEO, manager, co-worker, and team member because their destructive characteristics are practically invisible."
2. Counsellors identify psychopaths based on a pattern of actions that lack empathy. A psychopath might be very "nice" when he meets you, but as soon as he can benefit by throwing you under the bus, he does so with no display of remorse. The lack of empathy is the defining characteristic of the psychopath--a non-psychopath will refrain from throwing someone under the bus because they empathize with that person. Steve Jobs fucked over his colleagues without remorse. Woz then gave them all money because Woz felt bad--Woz showed that he has empathy. Jobs showed he does not. This is why psychologists consider Jobs an obvious case of a psychopath.
3. Vulnerable people discover psychopaths due to the classic psychopath turn. When at a moment's notice the person you thought was so nice to you turns on you and you realize they were just using you. When they "turn" they go back on promises, they throw you under the bus, backstab you, generally fuck you over. Usually they do this by getting you to trust them first because they seemed so nice that you trusted them. This happens ALL THE TIME in the tech industry and if pg isn't aware of these cases he is willfully ignorant.
But, meeting someone for the first time, all you see is a charming smile, a warm handshake, and a nice, brilliantly intelligent person.
It should also be noted that many sociopaths also just end up in prison, because they're impulsive, don't care about others, and manipulate people, which can end very badly in most cases. It's not like sociopathy is a superpower; on the contrary it is a massive deficit. Most CEOs are not sociopaths, but the fact that the ratios are so screwed up is illuminating, because it tells us about our society more than anything else: we have optimized empathy, and the optimal amount is zero.
So pg is just factually wrong.
Pg seems to have some kind of fantasy that Jessica is a gifted psychologist. The truth is that she probably is when compared to other autism-spectrum programmers, but not when compared to professional cousellors or other people whose job it is to understand and empathize.
What Jessica considers niceness--"niceness for the purpose of making money"--is not going to be the same as what most people consider niceness.
The programming world scores high on the autism spectrum and on the psychopath spectrum. Compared to the rest of the world, programmers seem like very mean, cold, ruthless people.
PG is sharing observations based on seeing hundreds of founders succeed or fail.
You are wrong.
Disagreeable individuals place self-interest above getting along with others. They are generally unconcerned with others' well-being, and therefore are unlikely to extend themselves for other people. Sometimes their skepticism about others' motives causes them to be suspicious, unfriendly, and uncooperative. People very low on agreeableness have a tendency to be manipulative in their social relationships. They are more likely to compete than to cooperate.
Do you have any actual knowledge of the Big Five psychometric scales, or are you just saying that because you want it to be true?
Disagreeableness is a scientifically validated and incontrovertible synonym for meanness.
Agreeableness is a personality trait manifesting itself in individual behavioral characteristics that are perceived as kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm and considerate. In contemporary personality psychology, agreeableness is one of the five major dimensions of personality structure, reflecting individual differences in cooperation and social harmony. People who score high on this dimension tend to believe that most people are honest, decent, and trustworthy.
Agreeableness is a synonym for niceness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Agr...
The agreeableness trait reflects individual differences in general concern for social harmony. Agreeable individuals value getting along with others.
This is absolutely not the opposite of meanness. If Wikipedia is incorrect, please edit it. Note that unlike a YC comment, a Wikipedia edit will require a real citation.
Or just go read a book, textbook, or journal article on the big 5 system.
Source: I'm a grad student in psychology. Specializing in empirically keyed personality psychometrics (i.e. psychology centered on data analytics. I also have a BS in CS. I'm basically a "data scientist" / statistician)
Take your counter example pg. He is the business of excluding people which is actually pretty mean when you consider the damage path. The operating mechanics behind this very forum, designed intentionally by pg, are considerably mean, but of course all of this will depend on who you are and where you sit relative to any action taken by any given person.
> For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands...
History is littered with examples how gaining control was simply a matter of: ownership, negotiating, venturing through difficult terrain or access points, or even plain old racing to be the first person there and establishing a stronghold.
The word 'stronghold' is interesting. It implies force, yet often does not require any. Where one person might use the world 'stronghold' another might use 'establishment'. HN is an establishment. It maintains its strong hold on high quality content from its users via mean practices like hell banning over trivial things like not agreeing with it's owners or because of some relative interpretation of meanness held solely by its owners.
I'm not persuaded that Microsoft substantially held back the internet. IE of a decade ago was not a great browser by today's standards, but the hardware of the time could not have really supported the javascript-heavy apps that we take for granted today. I occasionally use gmail and google maps on a G4 powerbook with a "modern" browser (TenFourFox), and it's pretty painful. It almost feels like being back on a 48K dial-up ISP service. And let's not forget that Microsoft invented (or at least had the first browser support for) the scriptable XMLHttpRequest, the foundation for almost all of the asynchronous web apps that we use today. In fact way back in IE 5 (with the MSXML ActiveX plugin) you could build rich, responsive interfaces and asynchronous interaction using XML, XSLT, and scripting YEARS before you could do it in any other browser.
http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
In particular:
http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm#v
There was more than just what the court found, however.
You're absolutely right. Think of all the billions of dollars that Gates donated to AIDS research, cancer research, vaccinations, etc. But no matter how many lives he saves, he'll never be able to make up the fact that he held back the internet for 6 or 7 years.
I'm confused by your comment. Sure Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle are older established companies but from everything I know about Apple and Microsoft their stories seem very much to fit the startup mold (don't know much about Oracle). And the other three Zynga, Facebook, and Uber are comparatively much more recent successes that definitely took the standard seed funding to VC route and embody everything you would think of as a modern startup.
So you're saying that this doesn't apply to super successful startups? Honestly that's not been my experience, both personally and from plenty of stories I've heard from the more "modest" startups that have been successful but not on the same grandiose scale these companies have been.
In PG's view startups succeed because they actually create some real value, something that other people want. And to build something like this it helps to be nice.
Maybe I'm naive, but it's hard to say that PG doesn't know what he is talking about when he talks about startups :).
Of course this is a weird post. I think he wanted focus on the aspects of flattery involved in praising technology. You are providing counter-examples to a theory where his evidence is "my friends aren't assholes", which, while surely true, has a potential confound he doesn't discuss, and "people YC likes do better than those that we don't like", which isn't surprising for a SV power nexus.
I would be very interested if you could elaborate on the specifics of "the billions of damage he caused humanity" and "held the internet back for 6 or 7 years", these seem like rather extraordinary claims.
It's so unbelievably mild to the walled gardens of today's app store where Apple, Google or Microsoft could freely choose to eliminate all browser apps on their platform if they chose.
As for the others, they're more open because they see it as a competitive advantage. That's something Microsoft didn't have to think about, since they owned 95% of the market and nobody would figure out how to break in for over a decade.
I wouldn't say that bundling IE was bad. What was bad was so thoroughly crushing all of the competition that "Windows" and "PC OS" became all but synonymous, and then that lack of competition causing terrible stagnation and the terror-filled reign of IE6.
That is not true, otherwise, what do you have to say regarding Chrome for iOS [0]?
[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrome-web-browser-by-google...
They drove the competitor (Netscape) out of business by giving away their browser. There's no way for the market to correct for that or "a feasible competitor to emerge".
It amazes me that someone who's only 5 years younger than me and even has a CS degree is so completely out of touch with recent computer history. I understand why, everything changes so fast, but you cannot understand what MS did if you weren't there. Their callous destruction of Netscape stopped an era of rapid innovation in internet technologies, HTML & js simply stagnated for almost 6-7 years afterwards, before it had been iterating rapidly.
It is now back to iterating like it did, these last 2-3 years and the WHATWG, it really feels like things are back on track again, though some really, really important things are still taking a while (like observables, which are super important for GUI driven apps).
It's an imponderable, we'll never know the answer. You are extrapolating it out to a scenario where IE didn't exist, and Netscape, the standards organizations, and all the other key players were harmonious stewards of some sort of golden age.
I'm not saying that I support anything that Microsoft did in the '90s, rather that it is totally plausible to me that the players in the no-IE parallel universe were perfectly capable of screwing things up just as badly or worse. Since it's extrapolation, what's plausible to us says more about how we feel about the different players than anything else.
The problem was the combination of IE6 (at the time, the best browser out there) and MS business tactics simply crushed everyone else. At that point MS decided to work on other things and let IE waste.
They did a lot of other strange things as well. I know Microsoft people showed up to at least one IETF working group pretending to be interested in doing standards work, only to return later having patented key points of the standard, saying they weren't interested anymore.
So IE was just a small part of that famous strategy, even if it was a central piece. But the bundling was never much of an issue unless you were a direct competitor. The only reason that's what people remember is the court case was widely reported in media at the time.
It always saddens me to think of how many people want to see this principle enshrined in law.
But if anyone killed Netscape by giving away free software it was the Apache project since for a while selling web server software was a viable business, while OTOH there's really no historical data to support the fact that selling web browser licenses was ever going to be an economically successful strategy outside of niche markets like Opera.
And whether or not Microsoft directly killed Netscape or not, I'd argue that the web would not be nearly the ubiquitous technology it is today if web browser software typically cost money, which means that by standardizing web browser software as free Microsoft did the entire web industry (if not netscape) a great service, really.
It wasn't until IE4's years-long stagnation that IE had what I would consider a negative impact on "keeping the internet back" and Netscape's spectacular pre-Firefox implosion had just as much to do with that as Microsoft's IE bundling did, since there was a good stretch with no really viable alternative browser that didn't suck even worse than IE.
And on the topic of Netscape's implosion, I'd argue that while Microsoft's business practices didn't do Netscape any favors, Netscape's complete failure as a company was 50% on Netscape itself executing poorly, 49% on apache totally killing the idea of "paid web server software market" and maybe 1% Microsoft's business practices... at best).
Also to be fair you also have to factor in the many ways in which Microsoft pushed the "internet" (and by that I am speaking mostly of the web) forward. One example: XMLHttpRequest ("Ajax"), prior to which the web was a very static "electronic pamphlet"-y place.
I'd also argue that not bundling IE with Windows would have held the internet (in terms of people being connected) back a lot more than bundling it did. At the very least IE is (still) the best, easiest way to download and install Chrome on a new Windows install.
I personally used the Zortech tools in my C/C++ days, played Empire a ton, even written a few hobby clones of Empire.
In fact you might call yourself lucky for not going into business with MS, or you would end up like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#T...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#T...
The same kind of thing happened 15 years later with UEFI and Secure Boot.
That's 7 years less of internet and technological perspective he gets to experience in his mortal life, if that's actually the case.
It depends on what you think is more valuable. Are you working in tech for tech? Or are you working in tech to make money? Just because these people made a lot of money, doesn't make them totally knowledgeable about all tech.
I think as long as you give ideas openly, you get ideas back. You teach people about tech, you learn about tech back. People who get greedy are fucking themselves in one way or another. With all that fame, independence, and achievement comes a lot of opportunity to miss developing a sense of humility, social connection, and interpersonal growth.
But, I think there is a cautious difference we must make here. There is a difference between meanness, and the attempt to make fair judgments - diplomacy. The position of a person who has to decide the fate of their company and the effects that has cascading down human generations on technology and human growth in general, is not in an easy position to be in. If these were simple problems, we would see simple answers.
It is easy to look back at people's decisions in retrospect and criticize. It's hard to make those decisions when you are actually there. It's hard to empathize with people that seem like assholes, but I wonder if they have difficult empathizing with themselves. We get to see a sliver of who these people are, and that sliver is distorted through a chorus of echoes across culture.
Which is to say, they're lottery ticket winners. And that's super, but it is a bad idea to model your personal finances on lottery ticket winners.
In the rest of the stupid world, with people who are just grinding it out day by day and not jousting with billionaires, being nice is a very, very, very good idea. Being nice keeps doors open. Being nice to everybody you can keeps a lot of doors open. You never know when your next deal, or next gig, or next hire is going to come from. I can't tell you how many times I have gotten a great opportunity (often years after the fact, or through a friend of a friend of a friend) through helping people out just to be nice.
You can't dictate luck, but you can absolutely put yourself in a position to be lucky. And the more times you can spin the wheel, the better off you are. Having people in your corner is a powerful influencer of this.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to finish a very profitable contract job that I got because I liked to hang out and drink beers with the drummer who lived next door a couple years back. (Who subsequently went on to become the head of marketing for a national firm. When hippies sell out, they go all the way.)
jobs, ellison, gates and as it's currently looking to be, zuckerberg. sustained success, even after massive setbacks. you don't build billion dollar companies (as in revenue, not fantasy valuations) on pure luck.
you build them on being a mean motherfucker. practically all of history is evidence against PG here. edison. ford. rockefeller. etc etc etc.
Everyone focuses on the last statement but misses the premise, which is a recurring theme in Graham's essays.
human beings that strive for greatness are ruthless, that necessary focus and willpower come with a price. it can be seen everywhere - politics, the military, arts, sports,...
Put plainly:
You're not a billionaire. Acting like one is a poor strategy. We plebians are well served by being nice if we want to move up the bracket.
By all means, when you are rich and powerful, act like kind of a prick. You might need to act like a prick. I honestly couldn't say, but you could make a very plausible case for not being sunshine and rainbows all day, saying 'no' a lot, and pushing people pretty hard. (Lying, cheating, and stealing is another matter-- these are principally the actions of desperate people. Being a tough businessperson doesn't make you a jerk, though.)
But do yourself (and the rest of us) a favor and don't go there until you have to.
"It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean."
There's probably a disconnect between the most successful people pg knows personally, and the handful of tech CEO's you know only from reputation. I'm willing to bet not even pg knows (or knew) Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison personally. Who does he know?
"I only know people who work in certain fields: startup founders, programmers, professors."
There are hundreds of successful startup founders, and you can name seven mean ones over the course of almost 50 years. I'm sure if we worked together we could come up with a few more, but it's a small, countable number. Y Combinator probably funds around seven successful startups every year, and that's not even counting the programmers and professors. I'm willing to bet PG's experience outstrips anything that you or I know purely from reputation.
Plus, I think some of your examples actually support pg's argument. Take Uber, for instance. The technical implementation of Uber is trivial. What enables Uber to survive is their ability to pick and win political fights with the taxi cartels, which is exactly the kind of place where pg would expect mean people to succeed. Oracle and Microsoft won, not based on technical merit but based on enterprise sales and deal-making.
I would never call these people nice, but I'd say they were nice to me. Often how nice someone is depends on where you're standing and how they see you.
If someone is nice to people when it's advantageous to them, all that means is that they're not an idiot. You can learn a lot about someone's character by how they treat people they don't have to be nice to.
Just talking to people at a party or a business dinner is not enough to get any semblance of character judgment aside from some pretty stylistic ones (small cues that say more about preferences than worldview, for example). Even playing golf together can hide monstrous raging alcoholics and serial killers from us all because these people have developed almost split personalities after decades of manipulating people. It's not necessarily conscious either but almost a personality trait like being really energetic, quiet, paying attention to detail obsessively, etc. I say all this as the son of someone that's got the cult leader personality type and how he works has framed how I absolutely refuse to work. Some might argue I'm doing better but I don't think so in terms of the original article context at all.
It should also be noted that pg's sample is somewhat biased against Fortune 500 companies and dysfunctional yet still-in-business organizations that employee so many but repel those like pg and perhaps those he knows as well. Furthermore, the kind off folks that are attracted to in dysfunctional orgs are similar to men that prey upon insecure women. There's similar equivalents for business folks too.
So, in short I think pg has been blessed to still have this optimistic view of any flavor of meritocracy. It's nice to be able to turn away from companies where failure is constant, rampant, and extensively rewarded to these kinds of people that don't do well as leaders in start-ups and even finance. I used to hold his view but after my career I regard it as an idealistic notion.
This is what kills the whole idea the article is based on for me. Given his position in the "startup world" pg is like an extremely physically attractive female who thinks all the men around her are super nice. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but either way their interactions with you (and those closest to you) are probably not an accurate measure of that.
What defines whether someone is mean or not to me is how they treat people who they don't want anything from, which (soft retirement aside) is a position pg will never be in with regards to startup founders.
"My wife and Y Combinator cofounder Jessica is one of those rare people who have x-ray vision for character. Being married to her is like standing next to an airport baggage scanner. She came to the startup world from investment banking, she has always been struck both by how consistently successful startup founders turn out to be good people, and how consistently bad people fail as startup founders."
So he's not judging the character of these founders based upon how nice they are to him, but based on Jessica's purported "x-ray vision" for character, which presumably can't be easily fooled by the usual deference seen in the founder/investor relationship. I don't know. But I think the evidence he has access to is a lot greater in extent than the evidence you or I have access to.
And I'm sure he has access to vast more amounts of evidence about founders than I do, but that doesn't mean he knows how to correctly analyze the evidence or won't look at the evidence with partisan eyes. This country is still filled with climate change deniers, even ones that are intelligent in most other parts of their lives.
Just look at history to see how wrong PG is about mean people failing. Zuckerberg by many accounts did not treat his partners fairly, that was mean of him. Gates tried to screw over Paul Allen numerous times, not a nice guy. Steve Jobs denied the paternity of his first born (one example of many negative Jobs' stories), what a lovely fella. Both Uber and Snapchat are prime examples of companies being led by less than noble morality and Github epitomized how to do it right, until they were an example of sexual harassment. Is any of this enough for PG to categorize these founders as mean? If not, how many acts of meanness make someone mean (and vice versa, how many acts of kindness makes someone kind)?
Paul Graham is a very intelligent man and by all rights, seemed to have earned his success and reputation. But if PG was always right, especially since he has all this evidence about SV and startups, there wouldn't be any failed YC companies, they'd all be IPOs and massive exits. PG is not infallible.
PG does make some good points, I really like the last paragraph.
"So I'm really glad I stopped to think about this. Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean. We tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not meanness. And now I have both an additional reason to crack down on it, and an additional argument to use when I do: that being mean makes you fail."
I've seen a lot of mean people succeed, but that is a great lesson to teach, even if it is a bit faulty. Maybe if we all teach our children this, one day it would actually become true.
And if you're going to come into the thread and question that based on a handful of examples of people you've never met personally but have only heard about through the media, whose side am I supposed to take, exactly? As little basis as pg might have to make general statements about the character of most startup founders (and programmers, and professors), you have even less, because you're just going off what you hear in the media, and "<<founder of massively successful startup>> is a nice guy" is not a story that gets many clicks.
Are most successful startup founders nice people? Are mean people less likely to be successful in startups? Maybe. Paul Graham says so, you say no, and from where I'm sitting Paul Graham has the more educated opinion. But from the perspective of someone reading the essay, I'm willing to say: I don't have any evidence to disagree with you, and it's kind of interesting to see where you go exploring why that might be the case whether than making a futile attempt to prove a point that almost nobody has the evidence to argue for or against either way. Which isn't to say I believe your premise on blind faith, but I'm willing to accept it for the sake of argument and let you get to your real point.
Do you refute any of the reported stories? Do you believe Paul Allen was lying when he said Bill Gates tried to screw him? Do you think all the negative stories about Jobs was just sour grapes over his success? Do you believe there was no sexual harassment at Github? Or that the actions of Uber's executives to this point have all been with the purpose to spread love across humanity? If you can't refute any of the stories other than by saying the media is biased or negative news gets more clicks, then you have your proof that Paul Graham is wrong.
Your only argument is that PG knows better than I do without actually refuting my argument that PG only sees what his position allows him to see, the founders being nice to him and around him. Instead of taking PGs argument at face value and just saying I'm wrong, why don't you try to prove his argument correct, or prove my examples are either wrong or outliers.
And my point has always been Paul Graham is meeting these people as peers (and so is his wife). These people are going to be nice to him and around him, giving him a false sense of the founders true character. But over time a person's true character will reveal itself or be revealed by stories of those who worked with them. I believe we have enough stories to posit PG is wrong.
> Do you personally know Paul Graham or are you basing your belief in him on stories in the media and in his writing? If you haven't met him, how is that any different than me believing in these media reports?
I don't "believe in him". I give him higher credence than I give you because he personally knows hundreds of startup founders and you don't. Carefully reread the end of my last comment if you're unsure where I stand on this. I don't have a strong opinion either way and, aside from the natural human compulsion to have a strong opinion on everything regardless of the evidence at hand or lack thereof, there's no reason for you to have a strong opinion either.
> Do you refute any of the reported stories?
I don't think they provide enough information for me to make a blanket judgment about another person's character, and even if so, you've mentioned like four founders, which is nowhere near a large enough sample to refute pg. Plus, half of your examples kind of balance each other out: there are lots of stories about Woz being a nice person, and Paul Allen seems to have lacked the barracuda instincts of Gates by all accounts, so if you're going to take the media reports at face value you already have half as many nice founders as mean ones.
1. What defines a mean person? How many negative actions does it take before we can decide someone is mean. And how large do the actions need to be. A lot of this depends on how well we know the subject. If a friend acts mean on several occasions I might ignore it or prescribe it to a bad day. If I read about the founder of Uber doing the same thing, maybe I feel the guy is a dick. Of course the more reports and the more we either have to ignore the signs or admit our friend maybe the dick.
2. How many mean founders need to succeed for PG to be wrong? Is one enough or is that an outlier? 10%, 25%, 50% or more?
I've listed some of the most successful examples, from several decades. If all these founders are mean, then I'd say that goes a long way to proving PG wrong. And just because these founders had partners that were nice doesn't prove PG correct because it was the mean partner that had the greater success (Jobs v Woz, Gates vs Allen). If the stories out of Github and Uber are true then again we have two recent success stories that show a mean disposition isn't the roadblock to success that PG believes it is.
My belief is essentially that start-up founders aren't any different than any other entrepreneur at least in disposition. There will be both mean and nice success stories. I've yet to see anything to refute this, and that includes PG's essay with all his "evidence", his wife's "sixth sense" and your posts.
So what's the rational thing for me to do as a reader? What I did was to say, "I wouldn't know, but I'm curious to see where you're going with this", and it turned out he went somewhere interesting with it. Whereas you just shut your brain down because you could think of a half dozen sensationalized examples of people you've never met and missed out on getting to read an interesting essay (that incidentally also explains why, to name two examples, Bill Gates and the Uber founder are exceptions to pg's rule).
I found his article failed the simple smell test, if it smells like bullshit, it probably is. I've read the article over and over and each time it smacks of a noble in his guarded castle talking about how wonderful and safe life is under the new king and how the generosity of the new king knows no bounds, all the while his royal cousins are massacring the proletariat.
But please, go ahead and bury your head in the sand.
This is an important point.
Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Travis K. are each notorious. We love stories about these guys because they're entertaining and sometimes shocking (I admit, I certainly do, anyway).
You don't read much about Drew Houston or Chesky, except when Dropbox partners with Microsoft or Airbnb elaborately rolls out a new logo. But when Steve Jobs would reply to one customer's email, in his customarily curt fashion, there was always a press field day.
It's possible that "nice" CEOs are less interesting to talk about but no less effective.
My full comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674961
Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.
This is insane - nothing has fundamentally changed that makes scarcity no longer a primary driver for competition. The metrics for all startups etc... are scarce resources, namely cash and labor. Even if you assume that there is a glut of startup cash, the process proves that VC/Angel dollars are still scarce. Maybe that is a narrow interpretation of that phrase though.
Maybe he means that instead of "capturing" real goods like real estate, or oil or something like that which would be more apt for the "scarcity" title, the economy is leaning towards "knowledge" jobs. This just shows me how extremely disconnected from reality PG is.
The reality is that the world that he lives in (technology dev/VC etc...) rides on top of the cutthroat international game of resource dominance that he ignores. The real estate, energy and hardware resources that underlie the technology market are absolutely fixed pie games (when analyzed from production/consumption standpoint) where the most ruthless win.
Very disappointing that one of the start-up world's "thought leaders" has his head so high in the clouds he can't see his foundations.
Money does tend to allow one to become disconnected from reality.
As http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html explains, what you are missing is that what people really want is wealth, not money. And wealth is things of value created by people. As productivity improves, we can create more wealth. One form of that wealth is that we can make more efficient use of fundamentally scarce resources. Which admittedly does not increase them, but does decrease pressure on them.
The aggregate effect of these trends over time is truly remarkable. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo for a vivid demonstration of how remarkable it is.
The median worldwide income is up a lot more, but I do not have an easy graph for that.
The inflation adjustment is supposed to proxy for all the various utils your dollars (or shekels or yuan or rupees) can buy.
In practice, most people will accept this at least for a base point of argument as alternative measures tend to be even more controversial. Even those who have profound issues with money, price, value, inflation, wealth, and more. Such as myself.
A big part of the reason for that, was every US competitor got destroyed in WW2. The US inherited an open runway, and acquired over 50% of all global manufacturing at the peak accordingly.
As major countries, like Britain / France / Germany / Japan got their feet back under them, that competition drained the easy income and wealth off the top of the labor force in America. The rise of China, Brazil, India, etc and the opening up of the Soviet bloc has further stressed the US labor market, by increasing competition.
The peak that you're referring to that America has been coming down off of, was temporary and would not normally have existed had it not been for WW2. It was a fluke.
That massive concentration of income and wealth the US acquired due to WW2, has been gradually redistributed due to competition. People in Estonia, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Czech, Slovakia, Brazil, China, Australia, Canada, etc. etc. have seen massive increases in their standards of living the last 40 years.
The highest (adjusted for inflation) minimum wage in the US was in 1968 and comes out to $10.71/hr in 2013 dollars [1]. That's about $21,500 per year.
Where did you get the $35-40K number?
[1]http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/minimum-wage-since-...
But I did upvote you, because I do think a great many Americans really are oblivious to where physical goods come from in reality -- to the agricultural roots, the geological roots and so on of everything we consume, every single day.
Major AG firms like ConAgra and Monsanto have had more to do with those advances than anyone else and by every definition those firms and their executives are "mean."
This is true in many ways. I know too many people who live off by doing some creative work such as writing blog posts or making cool but specialized apps. I however don't think it can be generalized too much at this point because there is a huge factor of luck involved to successfully make a living by creating wealth. Most people have to rely on traditional competitive businesses for their employment.
A couple counterexamples come to mind. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and the Uber executive team, the Github husband and wife with the Horvath incident. Of course I can't generalize these cases either, but these are prominent companies where the truism doesn't hold.
Don't make me laugh about some pathetic losers like TPW and wife. They're bullies and they got what they deserved, if not enough.
Imagine pg entering some RoR shop (or better, Clojure) and getting his code reviewed by a CTO who's a few years out of college.
Now, a finance startup in New York where the stack is Java and .NET? Absolutely.
GitHub reached 150 employees without having anyone quit, which hardly seems likely if the Founder and CEO is mean.
I've certainly found that when I'm in a position of power people are kinder than when I'm not. And I've met a lot of "mean" people that I can disarm in a few seconds once I determine where that energy is coming from. (Are they scared? Overwhelmed? Defensive due to another, more buried issue?) Works online and off, in tech and the arts. Sometimes even while driving.
This essay offers no insights into the human condition -- and the detour into aggression/fighting is particularly weak and unsupported.
People have lots of reasons for being mean (or an asshole) in certain situations. And I'm certain pg, like all of us, has exhibited those behaviors at times.
You live in a society where successful people aren't mean. That's different from the rest of the world.
Maybe a more accurate title would be "Mean People Fail in Silicon Valley"
But there are at least big chunks of the world that mean people don't rule, and that territory seems to be growing.
I wish more of the essay was devoted to evidence of this, because it'd be amazing if true. But I don't personally see any evidence that mean people are becoming less influential.
When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists.
One specific counterexample: Gauss was extremely mean. And not only mean, but mean to his family:
Gauss eventually had conflicts with his sons. He did not want any of his sons to enter mathematics or science for "fear of lowering the family name".[36] Gauss wanted Eugene to become a lawyer, but Eugene wanted to study languages. They had an argument over a party Eugene held, which Gauss refused to pay for. The son left in anger and, in about 1832, emigrated to the United States, where he was quite successful. Wilhelm also settled in Missouri, starting as a farmer and later becoming wealthy in the shoe business in St. Louis. It took many years for Eugene's success to counteract his reputation among Gauss's friends and colleagues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss
I feel bad pointing out a counterexample like this, because it's easy to cherrypick an example of a mean person here, a mean act there. More difficult to show a general trend. But isn't the difficulty of finding examples of nice people evidence that niceness isn't very pervasive, especially throughout history?
Silicon Valley has the same proportion of mean, nasty, ugly people as anywhere else in the world. And some of these people are successful, just like everywhere else in the world.
It would be naive to think that getting along with people well, while being a remarkable trait, isn't the only thing that leads to success. There are a lot of variables controlling that. It's just common sense that if you are good with people, you are more likely to be successful.
Lastly, I believe a lot of people will be spraying this thread with counterexamples as you did, but the greatest example of PG's argument is the one of the people who gave the world the Silicon Valley [1]. He could have been one of the most cherished person of the past century, he could have all the wealth he wanted, but instead he practically died alone, leaving many people with hatred towards him. Because he was "mean".
As a parent, you just don't do that to your children. Apparently Gauss badmouthed him regularly, to the point where he acquired a reputation outside of the family.
I think part of the general confusion is that "mean" and "fail" are both hard to define.
You are projecting contemporary parental attitudes where little darling cannot possibly do / be wrong on somebody who lived more than 2 centuries earlier, and had six children.
[1] http://nautil.us/issue/19/illusions/the-loneliest-genius (paywall)
I don't think it's the same trait, but many people often interpret criticism of their work as meanness. Sometimes it's quite hard to not see it that way, since an honest criticism may actually point out major flaws in your overall skills, talent, etc, not just some local error you made. Of course, the consensus forms that this person is an asshole. Unlike CEOs and other high level decision makers, most people do not face consequences if they do not call a spade a spade and risk offending others, so this makes it very easy for these types of brutally honest people to stand out as being unnecessarily critical. The net result often seems to be, however, better work out of the people who can take the heat, and a stronger overall team since the people who take criticism personally end up leaving.
Overall I think I completely disagree with pg here, it seems the most incredibly successful people are at least perceived as mean, because they have a character trait which allows them to cut through bullshit and not care about hurting a person's feelings by giving objective criticism.
[...] being mean makes you stupid.
Business and open source seem to both center around the same things: creating something people want [3] and surrounding yourself with other smart people. I would imagine that the latter is hard if you're mean - but not impossible. Take Linus or Steve Jobs, none of whom are very nice.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8#t=883
[2] http://www.wincent.com/a/about/wincent/weblog/archives/2007/...
"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FUCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fuck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"
And maybe clearly it was important for him to get that point across, to have people consider it; or, of course, reading one byte at a time via a system call is dumb: Since that practice had been going on for a long time, apparently he felt he needed to work hard actually to get the real and meaningful attention of people.
Another way to put it might have been, "What needs to be done, to go around with a 20 gallon barrel of ice water and one person at a time dump it on them to see if they are just asleep or really dead?". When seeing something clearly bad going on for a long time and still little or no outrage, or even effective attention, to improving the situation, can get frustrated and then be crude, rude, etc. if only just to get people shocked enough actually to pay attention.
Maybe I'm not the only one to "feel his pain", and maybe such a statement, under such a circumstance, does not make someone "mean".
The difference being if you cause offence but don't know it will hurt someone you're just rude. If you know it will hurt them and you do it anyways you're mean.
At this point Linus knows how his behavior affects people so to do it intentionally is either ignorant/stupid or mean.
From this one:
"There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to build great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence. The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money. The ones driven by money take the big acquisition offer that nearly every successful startup gets en route. [1] The ones who keep going are driven by something else. They may not say so explicitly, but they're usually trying to improve the world. Which means people with a desire to improve the world have a natural advantage. [2]"
From "Why there aren't more Googles":
"Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.
Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo—what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time—didn't sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo's or MSN's search box.
Why isn't it? Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to change the world for the better. This has a nice sound to it, but it isn't true. Google's founders were willing to sell early on. They just wanted more than acquirers were willing to pay.
It was the same with Facebook. They would have sold, but Yahoo blew it by offering too little.
Tip for acquirers: when a startup turns you down, consider raising your offer, because there's a good chance the outrageous price they want will later seem a bargain. [1]"
Though, I guess when you're that rich you can't help but think that anything that comes out of your mouth is a golden gospel, even if it is at odds with your previous statements. It sure is easy to play the whole holier-than-thou "I don't care about money I care about changing the world" game when you're already loaded.
This one mad me laugh, sounds like is just asking for more money :-)
Trollery is certainly not conducive to success because it destroys trust between you and the people you need to work for you. But if you can create a trusting circle of cronies then together you can lead them to do great but terrible things.
Edit To Downvoters: I am not being randomly flippant. Larger explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674961
I imagine damn few people, especially in the tech startup world, are mean to pg or in front of him. He is too influential and his dislike of "assholes" is well known.
So I imagine there is a certain amount of bias in his opinion here: Successful people aren't mean to him or in ways he would personally disapprove of. Of course, currying favor with him is one the things that helps lead to success in the tech startup world, so that bias no doubt runs both ways.
As someone who is a demographic outlier on most fronts for hn, I have certainly had people here be mean to me, some of them quite successful, some of them quite popular here. I don't talk much about it in part because that's probably a good way to shoot myself in the foot. Attacking people here isn't going to make me more well-liked, popular or connected. Some of them did horribly cruel things in a way that made sure they had plausible deniability and I was the one who ended up looking bad. I mention that not to badmouth anyone, but as testimony that I have reason to believe, based on firsthand experience, that pg has a blind spot here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_and_life_outcomes#C...
Startups may be different, but if Paul is correct what he is saying implies that successful founders are less likely to succeed when working for other companies. This would be interesting if true, but also such an unexpected finding that it seems more likely he and Jessica are simply nice people who are personally biased towards surrounding themselves with other nice people.
"Mean" has a very particular meaning. At least it seems to in this particular essay, if I may speak on behalf of PG regarding his use of it. He even hints at what it may be without explaining it directly:
Children (especially children of PG's age - both under 7 or so, I believe), when fighting with or teasing or blaming each other, are not usually described as "dicks" or "evil" or "unethical", or even "rude". They are too young to have those properties ascribed to them. It is common, however, for children to call each other "mean" while fighting, and it is also common for parents to tell their children "don't be mean" (as opposed to "don't be a dick", which is what teenagers tell their friends, or "don't do illegal things", which is what courts tell everybody). So when PG uses "mean", he uses it to describe behavior in adult-ish YC founders that is isomorphic to little kids being bad.
If you take the definition of mean to be "selfish or spiteful in a petty way", then yeah, most successful people are not mean. However, the operative word is petty. Most successful people avoid petty disputes. If this was the definition that PG was using, the essay would not have been worth writing. The explanation would be one sentence - successful people are not spiteful over petty things because it is not productive or efficient to wrapped up in petty things.
So when I wrote my comment, I inferred from the rest of the essay that PG was using a broader definition, that defined "mean" as being "selfish or spiteful, about big or little things."
I bet PG sees a lot of petty fights in YC. I was certainly part of one. If there's one overarching theme to PG's essays, it's something like: "smart people that would otherwise be successful repeatedly do things that are obviously counter-productive." Note the obviously. Yes, it is obvious that it is not efficient to be wrapped up in petty things, and yet it happens over and over again.
Mean people on the other hand are willing to say, hey, doing work on the UI thread and giving the user a bad, unresponsive user experience is bad and it needs to be done right. It's mean and it sucks, but you have to throw all this out and rewrite it better. Hey, just shoving new data in a complex data browsing framework doesn't give the user what they want when they want big pictures and easy to flick through options, etc..
Sure it is nice to let crappy ideas and implementations and whatnot through and just be nice to the person you are dealing with or working with, but it doesn't produce good results. In my experience it usually just produces me working weekends to fix their broken shit while they go around thinking they do a good job.
It is like controlling a RC hellicopter or quadcopter, you need to do very shuttle movements and is almost effortless. But if you let it to destabilize, the thing is hitting the ground hard and trying to fix it could make it worse.
If you leave someone working 6 months on something, you better control it correcting deviations soon, instead of just telling the person that all their work is worthless later.
People that avoid confrontation at all cost could make thing worse as when they are forced to act it is too late.
Uber and Travis Kalanick don't seem to be failing. They may have some negative publicity, but their growth is strong. Uber is probably worth more than any single yc company including Airbnb.
I think displacing the resident population of SF is pretty mean, as is creating a monoculture there.
Apathy matters.
"Criminals" are also good at being mistaken as mean people when they are really good.
Is that really someone that you'd want to emulate though?
You could make the case that Freeway Rick Ross is a really nice guy because he never had to use violence, but he still sold crack to people.
Good point. Is he "mean" or not? More curiously, is he "successful" or not?
(1) Legal.
Nevada just outlawed Uber. More generally, Uber stands to encounter a lot of legal push-back.
(2) Competition.
In e-mail of Sat 11/22/2014 12:20 PM, CBinsights reported that Uber has "27 alternatives".
(3) Localism.
Yes, maybe in each city, something like Uber, if successful, could have a network effect that would let it have a barrier to entry: That is, since all the drivers use Uber, all the riders do; and since all the riders do, all the drivers do.
But, the taxi business is geographically local so that success by, say, Uber in Boston does next to nothing to help Uber compete in NYC, Atlanta, Chicago, SF, LA, etc. So, in each city, Uber can be attacked by local competitors.
There's tons of state-controlled monopolies out there if you look hard enough.
In my limited world view, mean people often win. Mean police win. Mean politicians (like Putin) win. Mean business people like Steve Jobs, Donald Trump and Larry Ellison win.
No-one likes to be the target of meanness because it is a kind of psychic assault, an expression of derision or hatred or contempt. But it is remarkable what people are willing to tolerate, or even support, if they believe that it is in their best interest to tolerate it.
I wish the world was more like the one pg describes, and I can see how it is becoming more like that in certain areas, which is good. But that is a far cry from equating meanness with economic failure.
Forgive me for descending to the trivial: it's 'its methods'.
The more I stay in academia, the more I find out this is normal. Especially on the top, especially in elite universities.
This is disheartening particularly to me because I used to work in corporate, and I used to think then "boy, my work is not being fulfilled here". Now I come here and find out it's backstabbing all the way. I find out that the only way for me to get ahead is by taking sides, being a suck-up, and doing the dirty work the professors want me to do. The professors who've gotten ahead, they know this and basically orchestrate the game.
Steve jobs, bill gates, uber, dropbox, zygna. I guess those are all exception?
I moved to self hosted owncloud as a result.
Good point about the rest of her story though – she is a successful women and came from statistically unlikely circumstances.
Tough to balance those things out. In my view the participation in war crimes outweighs all other possible successes.
Edit: forgot to mention her role in authorizing torture.
"Clinton also stated that, while other countries also had weapons of mass destruction, Hussein is in a different category because he has used such weapons against his own people and against his neighbors."
http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/
"participation in war crimes"
Are you publicly accusing Condalizza Rice of war crimes? Do you have proof? Does HN support your claims and are willing to fight a legal battle on your behalf or testify in your defense?
(for example, the US was found guilty over Nicaragua and basically just ignored it)
Her involvement in the Iraq war, the Bush torture program, and so on are also reprehensible in my personal opinion, but in this case we can leave those aside; I would think that her position on warrantless wiretaps alone would be sufficient for anyone who cares about privacy to want her kept far away from Dropbox.
(And there's nothing about being liberal that requires one to mindlessly support everything any woman or minority says or does. It does you no credit to hold such a childishly simplistic view of your political opponents.)
2) Most succesfull people are also good at PR and pretending to be nice to everybody, especially somebody like PG, but in general too. They can still be very mean in covert ways.
I think instead of the assertion "mean people fail" being true, I think instead we can more truthfully say:
People who lack the interpersonal skills to hide their meanness when it can be damaging fail.
Mr. Graham, you are a well known millionaire investor. Of course start up founders are going to be on their best behavior around you. And the ones who aren't, are going to fail because not only will you not be interested in helping them, but none of your friends will either. If someone lacks the self control to behave around you, then they probably lack the self control to behave around others.
But knowing how to behave is not the same as being a nice person.
Someone can act very nice to everyone and still be a cold hearted son of a bitch. You can be really polite and friendly while you are destroying someone's life.
Anyway, it seems to me that most people (at least here in the west) would vastly prefer a product created by people that operate with integrity, humanity and decency to one created by dicks all else equal. And that a slightly inferior product can beat a better one out by having a better more positive story behind it.
I think there are already economic incentives for founders to behave well and that this trend will continue. The employees and customers talk freely on secret, glassdoor, etc and I think it's critical to realize that if you don't operate with decency and good values people will a) know about it, b) make purchasing decisions based on that, c) take that into account when considering employment.
I think companies will increasingly make an active effort to (if nothing else for purely financial reasons): a) operate with decency and good human values b) protect and elevate the company and it's people by making this clear to the public
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk#t=890
"Technology has increased the number of positive sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in by allowing the trade of goods, services and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of people."
We still have a tendency to revert to meanness when resources become scarce - e.g. dwindling runways without forthcoming funding or competitors eating away at our market share. In many cases, It plays into the death spiral - visionary thinking, paced discovery and creative exploration of a problem space are replaced with short-term thinking, churn, frustration, and ultimately failure.
In developed nations we've had the privilege of being able to take our time, spending at least 12 years of our lives educating ourselves instead of ploughing fields. Hans Rosling's talks get into this too: technology has allowed people to liberate time previously devoted to sustenance farming, washing clothes, 4 hour walks to the market. That time gets shifted to activities like education.
There's a common them here of not letting our immediate needs overwhelm our ability to pursue goals that can dramatically change our lives and the world around us. Our opportunity is rare and the privileged position we have to pursue ideas can often be tenuous. In a way, if we don't hit escape velocity, we don't simply float, we crash.
Meanness is a hack (one that doesn't even have an explanatory comment).
Yet when it is actually measured (by which I mean more than just considering what you think of your wealthy friends) people who are less well off turn out to be much kinder. This has been measured and isn't speculative.
But regardless of the evidence we can just appeal to how people actually behave. How many successful start up people are 'nice' or even good when considered against the world net and the potential they have. We all have the opportunity for radical redistribution, but the ridiculously wealthy even more so. To talk as if they are somehow nice because they help other people of similar privilege is in very poor taste.
The remarks about needing safety come off as particularly horrid in the context of the vast wealth inequality the article is describing in such a joyful way.
Like fuck do successful start up owners and investors need security more than someone working a temporary contract for minimum wage to support a larger family in worse conditions. They are the people that need security and safety.
People like Steve Jobs or Lyndon Johnson were legendary for being charming to people they needed but abusive to people who were under their thumb. Zuck can be a nice person to many people, but also can be an asshole to people who he thinks are not useful to him and who are wasting his time.
It goes the other way too. Paul Graham compares founders to internet trolls. I know someone in real life, who got banned from this forum and real life events due to trolling and hurling insults. That person is quite nice in real life (or, at least he is nice around me). In many cases the troll on the internet is the person who in real life has to always bite their tongue and say the nice thing, trolling on the internet is the one place where they can be the Steve Jobs asshole and not suffer consequences.
PG is a millionaire investor. I can readily believe that any founder who cannot shield their mean and ruthless streak from PG, would not be a good founder. Successful people are very adept at knowing when to work the charm, and when to be ruthless, knowing when they have to hold their tongue, and when they can speak their mind without consequences.
I'm trying to think of what evidence would convince me that founders were actually less mean than your average high-level person in some other industry. I think you would need to do a series of private interviews with their subordinates and ask questions about how often they get berated or screwed over.
I'd also be interested in hearing the experience of anyone who has switched from being mid-level in finance to mid-level in tech. Is there really a difference in "meanness"? PG cites Jessica's experience, but she was switching to a position in tech where she had the position of dominance over the founders, so she always seeing their good side.
It has been my experience that the people at the top in tech generally have a ruthless streak. Tech founders and execs are more ruthless/situationally mean than the people at the bottom. The founders have the ability to turn a switch and treat employees as tools, rather than people. This may be necessary if you have to fire people and make other hard decisions. I do not think that this ruthless streak is necessarily a bad thing.
"There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to build great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence...They may not say so explicitly, but they're usually trying to improve the world."
Keep in mind that a desire "to improve world" is a synonym for a "lust for power." The first is a positive way of putting it, the second is a pejorative, but it is the same thing. A neutral phrasing is that founders "desire influence". Founders hold on to their startup rather than selling because they like being in the thick of things, having attention, being able to shape and move a service that millions of people use, and have an impact on tens of millions of people. This desire for influence is not at all incompatible with being an asshole to people who are not useful or who are in the way.
"Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them."
Anyone who is mean all the time will certainly fail. Who are these people though? Most people who are indiscriminately cruel are probably also low IQ (they are not even smart enough to manipulate) and max out at being a sales manager for Dundler-Mifflin.
All things being equal, an employee would rather work for a nice boss than a mean boss. But employees also want to work for a winner, and will often accept a boss with a mean streak as a trade-off in order to work for a winner.
"Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things."
The "but" should be an "and". The "scarce resources" are market opportunities for capturing a lucrative monopoly with only minimal upfront costs. Based on the underlying state of technology, there are only so many opportunities for a small team of hackers to build simple apps that can gain traction and turn into wildly successful products.
Startups also require a large amount of hustling. You have to convince a lot of people to bet on you before there is solid evidence that you have a great product. The amount of hustling, salesmanship, confidence games, self-promotion, "naughtiness", that can be required would make a lot of us hackers feel very uncomfortable. So while there is a selection for makers, there is also a selection for people who have a fair amount of narcissism and who are comfortable pushing ethical boundaries.
It might be that YC is particularly good at picking and accelerating startups based on having founders who are great makers rather than great sellers. This really would generate a better class of founder, and would make their startups more ethical and less mean than the typical VC backed startup. If this is the case, then kudos to YC.
This is simply not true. Many people see something that is wrong in the world and genuinely want to make it better. I'm not talking about companies like Uber that see how rich people just can't get private car quite conveniently enough and want to make that better, I'm talking about people that see real important problems and injustices and try to improve them, like Watsi for example.
I'm sure that there are some people who just want to grab power and influence and call it "trying to improve the world", but there are also people who genuinely want to make the world a better place with no concern for money or power and work tirelessly every day to do so. While sadly these people are usually not well known, they are the real heroes.
The definition of power is the ability to actualize ones will.
When we approve of what someone is doing, we call use the positive term, "they are trying to change the world." When we disapprove, we say they are on a power-trip. It's the same thing though. Since Watsi is small and their mission is something that virtually everyone agrees with, everyone is unanimous that they are "trying to change the world." But if you look at a larger charity, that has more controversial missions, such as the Gates Foundation, you will see a lot of people of accusing the foundation of being on a power trip, of abusing their privileged position to play God with the lives of the poor and weak.
There is a distinction between desiring money versus status versus influence/power. There is also a distinction between being ambitious and having ambition. The ambitious person has a vague sense they want to get ahead or improve the world. The person who has ambition has an actual reality they want to see realized. But there is not a distinction in motivations between the person who wants to change the world versus the person who wants power. The difference in terms comes from the outsider looking on, who will choose the positive or pejorative term based on the consequences of the actions.
If you're one of those HN readers who habitually check the comments before deciding whether to read the piece, know that this normally reliable filter is not working here.
But is that really in your best interest?
The way this is stated this is how it breaks down:
- I have a better job opportunity (all things equal meaning presumably there are nice people at that job as well at least potentially) that I have passed on.
- The people at my current job are nice to me and/or my boss is nice to me and/or is not an asshole
In the above case it seems that you have been disadvantaged by a loyalty that isn't based on anything concrete simply because you like the people and/or the way you are treated.
Under that premise you might be a programmer at the local small 10 person wholesaler and have a great boss and a great working environment and/or a sense of loyalty because of how well you are treated. And completely miss an opportunity (assuming of course such opportunity is important to you) to work for a much larger company with much more opportunity. Or take someone teaching at a small community college who passes up a potential job at a major university (once again assuming that is a better career path).
My point being that loyalty and a nice environment and the people that you work with are certainly great benefits but can also be in a sense golden handcuffs from progressing further in your career.
I have exceptionally poor skills at judging a person's true intentions and moral character. Hence, I trust almost no one. That's not to say that there aren't any trustworthy people -- I'm sure there are plenty. It's just to say that I've had some bad experiences that have led me to lose complete confidence in my ability to judge which people are really kind and nice people, and which are essentially faking it (it's one reason I'm scared to get married).
And with someone like PG, most startup founders want something from him (capital, networking, etc.) and so you could argue that he isn't going to notice the ones who have successfully faked being a "nice" person toward him.
> Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean.
I really like this. It makes me happy to see someone else state it. If I ever have children, the one thing I want them to be more than anything else is kind people.
To be quite honest, if Steve Jobs wasn't dominating, maybe the iPod Nano would have been much thicker. Maybe the Facebook experience would have sucked. Maybe Tesla would have filed bankruptcy. There is a long list of "Maybes" which could go here. From a societal standpoint, it's interesting. Ask someone in 1991 if Jobs in an asshole, the resounding answer is likely to be "yes". Ask someone today, and it's almost always pardoned with a "but he was a genius".
I had this very internal debate with myself throughout undergrad, particularly when you are placed in a group where you care the most for what ever project. The one who cares the most tends to have the most complete vision, and thus will strongly desire the pieces to fall a certain way.
I'd like to believe that not everyone is mean, but I can't help but wonder how possible it is to avoid "meanness" when the success of your organization hinges on your ability to execute a vision no one else can realize.
If you're going to ask whether meanness and success are "inversely correlated"—a phrase peculiar to statistics—then you should present actual data to support that argument.
I'd like to add a counterpoint. My own niche is nearly devoid of meanness. There are several participants offering products. They overlap, but none compete directly with each other. Customers typically use materials from multiple sources.
I think this influences those of us in the niche. Being nice is rewarded more than being mean. Competitors tend to collaborate.
I think this is a growing phenomenon. Unlike traditional business, the internet tends to create businesses without perfect substitutes. Cooperation becomes relatively more important than competition. Peter Thiel's argument about monopolies resonated with me for this reason.
In this environment, niceness becomes relatively more useful, and meanness becomes relatively more harmful.
The keyword being relatively. Where I think PG misses the mark is that there's still a lot of meanness. I think the interesting question to explore is whether there's less of it in the internet sector than in others.
(There may or may not be. I don't know what other niches and offline niches are like.)
Maybe one of the main points in several of the comments in this thread is very old:
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence.
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act I, Scene iii
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Eve...
The main point is that some people in how they present themselves to others, "in everyday life", put on an act something like in a stage play or play a role and where the act/role is not who they really are but, under the circumstances, to manipulate others.
OTOH, working with people face to face means you must keep appearances, and you almost always cannot be brutally honest. Even if you claim your company has a culture where you can be honest about things, no one is actually going to be totally honest, that would be a mistake. And you can never know whether someone who seems 100% authentic and kind isn't going to go online and rip apart things he thinks are dumb/ act "mean."
I think his essay is really more about how successful people just know how to be diplomatic and hold back honest opinions.
I would however be interested for PG to write about whether he thinks selfish and overly narcissistic founders are successful or not. I haven't meant any "mean" people working professionally (with engineers at least), but selfish to the point where you feel like punching them I most certainly have met in the startup world.
If we define successful as playing the capitalist game well, then sure, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison and others are all successful because they were sufficiently ruthless. Yet this too is selection bias, as there will surely be plenty of examples in the intersection of "people who don't fit pg's thesis" and "rewarded by society". There are, however, counter-examples: Warren Buffet comes to mind.
Just because something is rewarded by society doesn't automatically mean it is good. In fact, if you can succeed at capitalism and not be a dick, seems to me that's an even rarer thing to do, and all the more respect for doing it. In light of the current state of society, it seems a good idea to re-examine what society happens to reward.
We'll never know if Steve Jobs and others were/are truly happy. In fact, in a certain light, Jobs wasn't successful. For all his money, he happens to be rather dead. Who knows what truly great things he could have done after a successful battle with cancer. Every time Jobs is mentioned, until he fades from public view, people will talk about his storied career, his reinvention of Apple, his vision, etc. Everyone will also mention that he was an ass and died too young, because he couldn't get out of his own way and seek proper medical care soon enough.
Given that we all operate in contemporary society, there is of course a place for being assertive and ruthless when one needs to. But PG / Ycombinator is starting to tweak his/their definition of success. In 200, 500 or 1000 years, will anyone remember Loopt? Not likely. But if a YC company successfully develops a fusion reactor the size of a shipping container, or successfully develops a cure for HIV/AIDS, and does something truly great, then YC will still be talked about for quite a long time. Much like how we still talk about Archimedes today.
http://www.amazon.com/Topsy-Startling-Crooked-Elephant-Ameri...
PG doesn't stop to define "mean", and from reading his essay, I infer that PG's "mean person" is someone who is insensitive to the feelings of others, abrasive, irascible, and who tends to turn disagreements into knock-down-drag-out-pick-a-side confrontations. I find it odd that PG thinks that people like this don't succeed, because I know quite a few people both within and outside of SV who fit this description to a T and are professionally successful.
In fact, some (certainly not all) people who meet this description are GREAT PEOPLE. They're ornery and they don't suffer fools gladly; you're rolling the dice if you take them to a restaurant because they refuse to play the "I'm not going to say anything about the shitty service because I don't want to make a scene" game. That said, they're the first people you call when you need help with something serious, and they have your back even if doing so makes them lose social status.
It's especially odd that PG wrote this because in one of his most famous essays [1], he recommends that you only hire "animals" as early employees. When I do a quick mental inventory of the animals I know, the majority of them have a bit of a mean streak.
I would be in strong agreement with PG's essay if he defined "mean people" as those who derive pleasure or self-worth in putting down others. Those people are terrible, especially when they use passive-aggressive, plausibly deniable tactics to make other people feel bad. If there's one thing I've learned so far it's to break contact if I catch a whiff of that kind of toxic BS. Give me a productive mean person with a heart of gold over a tactful, toxic politician any day of the week.
Some points I agree with (a) Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things. (b) that being mean makes you fail (* increases the likelihood of you failing) (c) Start ups win by transcending
Some points I disagree with (a) Mean people fail (b) Successful startup founders, programmers, professors, aren't (all) mean (c) Startups are not just one random type of work in which meanness and success are inversely correlated -- This is just a sampling bias
I understand the sentiment behind the essay, which is that the ones that succeed in the log term in tech are those that operate in mutually beneficial ways and encourage positive feedback loops. But I think conflating this with lack of meanness is a red herring.
Edit: I should add that with "what PG really means" I don't intend to put words in his mouth. It is my potentially incorrect interpretation of his intent.
He treats "mean" as a known and monolithic entity that can be attached to individuals. "Mean" is a vague term that people might be sometimes, and not others. Sometimes being "mean" works to make you more successful.
Was Bill Clinton mean? Richard Feynman? Dan Quayle? Gerard Depardieu? Baudrillard? Did they fail? Succeed? Reducing people to binaries of mean / not mean and successful / failures is absurdly reductive.
Newton was a pretty mean thinker (in at least two senses) and is a good counter-example to some of these arguments.
I'm just really surprised PG didn't even mention or think about the fact that founders just might seem so nice because that's they way they choose to present themselves with someone with as much renown as himself. If I was sincerely trying to think about this critically that's the first thing that would pop into my mind.
If you keep this belief it is important to remember that it is not the case that that everyone that fails is mean.
Regarding the truth. It seems to me like the underlying claim that mean people fail is sadly false. However, it's likely that there are a lot of entrepreneurs that Paul and other investors turn down that get upset and fail for lack of support. I'm sure they aren't mean people in more favorable circumstances. Also, those that are funded generally are appreciative and nice.
"Mean" though is a very imprecise term. I would much rather he use the phrase 'malice.' Or even better 'malice' and 'schadenfreude.' PG is mean in the way that the weather is mean, it can hurt if you're not prepared but it's not out to get you. And it's likely people interacting with PG are careful not to demonstrate malice or schadenfreude because he is someone they wan't to have a good opinion of them.
Even given all that though, the basic thesis that successful people are somehow less likely to demonstrate fewer negative valence personality traits is born out by no research I know of. Here is some popular media coverage of the matter.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/drishtikone/2013/10/are-ceos-an...
It is not what we choose to become but who we are as a person that determines our success. Mean people do fail all the time morally and point proven they fail as founders too. We can continue to discuss what we think is mean but really we should be discussing character. Mean people will fail at least that’s how its supposed to work from a karma standpoint sadly it doesn’t happen. But as a founder, success does depend on the person you are and the environment and culture you create. Fighting is only a force but time and acceleration you are able to go the distance even from zero. That distance you create eventually leads to momentum, which then leads to transcendence. It is changing. For us improving the world is an advantage and for us having a moral standard is advantage. At this point we have an advantage do we become the mean people or the good people. Are we building good character or bad character? To overcome adversity create ingenuity that is unbelievable.
That doesn't strike me as a universal truth. My own experience in the world has been that many incredibly mean and heartless people succeed, even in the "nice" tech startup scene. My own experience is hardly a proof, but it certainly gives me reason to suspect PG's perspective is a little off on this one.
Could it be that meanness and failure come in a vicious circle fortifying each other? Put in another way, as people become more successful they become less mean? Hypothetically, the Paul Graham of the failed startup accelerator YC would end up being meaner.
Many homeless people end up appearing mean too. Maybe personal traits aren't innate unchangeable attributes but depend on our current status.
Now _big_ business? Different story entirely.
I've been privileged enough to work with lots of different businesses, of all types and sizes. I find that as a business grows, it becomes easy for managers and planners to become distanced from the "friends" they are trying to help.
It's no wonder PG sees mean people fail at startups: startups are supposed to be extremely emotionally close to problems or inefficiences that huge numbers of people face.
It sucks teaching your kids that the world is a mean, brutal place.
I don't think the fighting has gone anywhere. It's just changed its form. Any founder/salesperson will tell you it's harder than ever to get a prospect's or consumer's attention.
Being nice has nothing to do with the ageless struggle to stand out and triumph...grit.
Which, if you lack it, is the only trait I believe one can say is a sure shot to failure.
However I think meanness are generally not intrinsic, i.e., person isn't mean because they are naturally mean. It comes out because of the pressure of this survival game. You make a bad hiring decision and you don't have option to not let go the person even if they moved across country for you and took on expensive mortgage and have 3 school going kids. If you came to know that a competitor is going to release a product 6 weeks before you do then you might not have an option other than everyone work their every waking hour, including Christmas. Your admin brought down site 3 times because of an error and being "nice" to him risks this happen 4th time. And so on... These are the stuff painters, mathematicians and scientists don't have to deal with every day.
I do question the idea that taking an early big acquisition offer should be called a failure. The definitions of what startup success looks like seems to be highly skewed when coming out of YC vs. what the rest of the world thinks.
I live in Utah, where there are countless small tech companies, with a dozen or so employees, who have been creating their products and building comfortable lives for themselves for years. We're all quite happy with our lives, but because we aren't experiencing 100% year over year growth and "only" pulling in a few million a year, we don't meet the definition of success put forth by YC.
It is important to keep in mind that YC;s purpose is not to help any single specific individual. They work with large groups, with a goal to increase their investment over a diversified portfolio of companies. I see no evidence that they are malicious about it - they do seem to be benevolent. But their ultimate goals do not match up with my goals as an individual coder. So their definitions and philosophy will also differ, and I recommend that people just keep that in mind as they read.
The only two polite people were 1) an open source developer and 2) a guy who turned out to be YC alum. Neither wanted anything from me, and both offered good advice.
Perhaps it comes from the top. Thanks.
Anyway, the basic message is correct: when it comes to startups, it pays of more to focus on baking a bigger cake, than on fighting for a bigger slice.
Also didn't Mahbod try and excuse his behavior with a brain tumor or something? That's actually reasonable...
Anyway, that's kind of what I wanted to ask: is there a sufficient dichotomy there, such that someone without a well-developed sense of empathy or fairness can be successful by avoiding being outright mean? (And is that a good thing?)
Being mean is mostly a matter of perspective. People with power, who need to make decisions that affect other people will almost by definition be seen as mean once their decisions affect other people negatively.
Edwin Catmull spends a considerable amount of time talking about Steve Jobs in his book Creativity Inc. His main point about Steve was that he changed over the years and became more sensible to how his power and style affect others in other words he matured.
The book has some examples of decisions Jobs did that positively affected thousands of people amongst others the merger with Disney again something you can only do when you are in a position of power.
In that word is a plethora of nuances that one have to include when putting on predicates like this (arrogant is another widely imprecise term)
They can afford to be "nice" in person while their actions fuck over multitudes in way that is a thousand times uglier than being a dick to someone in person.
And although it probably sounds like hocus-pocus to most people to be making this claim, I think there are intrinsic properties in what it means to be "good" that may even allow this hypothesis to be scientifically proven one day (that "good" is a more powerful force than "evil").
Some of the far more disturbing human behaviors to me are complacency and selfishness.
Who knows if being mean directly or indirectly correlates with being "successful" as a founder. One may have to spend five years researching historical evidence to prove or disprove such a broad perspective.
There are different kinds of success. There is victory, and there's progress. In victory, you prove you're relatively better than others. In progress, you allow the whole society to lift itself into something that is just better.
That's true that you should not put money on a pedestal, but you should also understand that in order to do a better job, you should adopt a profit model just because you're in a capitalist country.
Of course mean people fail. Mean people don't have any intention or long term goal for what they want to do in their field of work, they lack strategy.
But on the other hand, hell is paved with good intentions.
One of the most successful CEOs was this guy Al Dunlop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_J._Dunlap). They called him Chainsaw Dunlop because he fired so many people.
Here's a Forbes article from 2011 that talks about the book and why (some) psychopaths make great CEOs.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-som...
A question successful people ask themselves is "Why be mean? What do I get out of it? What does my company get out of it?" They can be ruthless but realize that treating people with respect and warmth is smart in the long-game. Forum-trolls don't ask that question-- they just get emotional satisfaction from being mean.
Note that I'm not saying successful people are necessarily ruthless and manipulative-- just that they CAN be and still correctly be called "not mean".
I have come up with "miserable" or the more slangy "cutre", but I am not sure that these words capture its full meaning.
Any hint ?
I'm not an economist and my mental model of things is probably wrong, but how is business never a zero-sum game? Are users and their money not scarce resources that they'll either spend in your products (and thus funding your survival and your competitors' demise) or in your competitors' products (and thus funding their survival and your eventual demise)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcS04BI2sbk
Particularly the example of Buurtzorg, a Dutch healthcare provider, is quite convincing: They went from 0% to 80% market-share by basically being less mean to their employees and clients.
(This Ask-HN discussion is also related to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8662376)
A good person inside -and outside acting on behalf- of a company is definitely in the checklist for creating a great startup, I can personally tell. Modern leaders do not fit into the vertical violent commander type and simply loose followers without assembling.
However real life is much more grotesque, dantean and mean than that and bad people sometimes win. In my country there are lots of them and usually respond to a much larger and corrupted ecosystem.
I love that right now in silicon valley there is an abundant amount of successful good willed people. But if those lessons are not correctly passed down to their children, and this period of mobility stops (as it has in every other industry) the successful will be overpopulated once again by disconnected self important inherited wealth elites.
Brutal dictators use 'meanness' to remain in power for decades. Pimps, drug dealers, gang leaders, etc. Violence and intimidation is an excellent tool for success.
Going down a rung, you get political bosses, union leaders, etc. Powerful people are often mean in their dealings; they have to be. Being cold and calculating and using information to your advantage is one of the best ways to win a deal without using violence or intimidation.
Down another rung you have CEOs and other multi-millionaires/billionaires. Does the name Rupert Murdoch ring a bell? Or how about the Koch Brothers? (sorry, I have a liberal bias; i'm sure there's plenty of liberal millionares who work the same way) There's even a paper that describes a tendency for higher-paid CEOs to treat regular employees worse: http://www.cps-news.com/wp-content/misc_pdfs/When_Executives...
Let's face it: capitalism is a cutthroat way of doing business. Competition is good for individual people, but the true purpose of a capitalist entity is to effectively crush its competition in a way that doesn't bring it negative attention. Even so, often corporations treat people like shit, covering up widespread abuse and getting away with it because it can afford to. Being mean is practically a requirement of any successful multinational corporation.
As a final example: Wall Street. Tank a global economy, put people out of their homes, screw over businesses, all the while knowing what you're doing. You don't even have to serve jail time! Being mean pays. The better you are at it, the less consequences there are, too.
Finally, being mean doesn't make you stupid. Being angry makes you stupid; that's been effectively proven. The heightened emotional state changes the way you think and reduces the ability to reason. But being mean doesn't mean you have a heightened emotional state; it basically just means you lack empathy or compassion. And you can still reason pretty well with a lack of empathy.
Mean people don't fail. Stupid people fail.
The worst part was that the senior management had the impression that "good developers are mean" and so the situation wasn't dealt with.
It's one thing to be blunt and honest, but some people get mean when their own skill level isn't sufficient to make a convincing technical argument.
Or to put another way, a smart person who wants to effect change should try to develop a sense understanding of those they want to effect, it's harder to be mean to people whose "shoes you've walked in".
Add to this, the 'false humility', and self-deceptions, SV is actually way more narrow-minded than it used to be - very intolerant to anything that deviates from a certain expectations of conformity.
However, if you can succeed while still being good, then you are really talented, then you are a real founder at least in my book. There's not many of those, but there are a couple. I think startups have made it possible to create more good & successful people as they can become very successful very young, without being made ruthless by the business world over 10 or 20 years.
I am not optimistic that the results would be what he'd like, but I'm always willing to consider new evidence.
To create a society based on protection of property, the government must be mean to outsiders so it doesn't have to be to the insiders. When the government of a country with 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's wealth enforces citizenship and residency rights (a form of property), then that's considered mean by the outsiders.
Not so true in the wider software world.
It's quite a leap from Archimedes getting murdered to fear your ideas might be copied. Ideas can't be stolen. And if you really are motivated by wanting to make the world a better place, even copying your ideas shouldn't stop you.
Peace and rule of law are necessary. Rent seeking with over powered copyright laws and patents, not so much.
This is a wonderful quote, and a wonderful guiding principle. It's not correct in every single situation, but I don't think pg is speaking in absolutes.
How do you revolutionize a field? Not by immediately trying to replace an existing player, but by building something so useful that it gets adopted until it is a major player in the field.
I'm thinking of a whole realm of mean, arrogant, pretentious, often business oriented people who usually sell and don't create. And I wouldn't say they fail, they often do quite well. But to his point they don't become the best.
But being mean sometimes pays when you’re the big dog, and that’s when people show their true colors.
what an incredibly over the top dick response
Of course, although I do not advocate meanness and I do not like mean people, the reality states otherwise.
I thought these facts were obvious. People can lie, have secrets and thus appear nice... This article has such a sheltered, naive view of the world.
Seems like a bit of a lack of self awareness to say "welp, these guys are nice to me, the person they most need to be nice to, so they must be nice guys".
COO to CEO - what if we invest in our people and they leave? CEO to COO - what if we don't and they stay?
Of course the real reply is
CEO to COO - shouldn't we have fired them all by now?
- http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/d...
Bill Gates was known to be quite ruthless during his time at Microsoft, but he's changed that image of himself quite drastically.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1232
"Is it better to be feared or loved" comes straight from old Nick.
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
I think that disagreeing comments are not discouraged, if they are civil and if possible have a strong technical argument.
[Note: I upvote the submission, and a few of the disagreeing comments, because I think the article is in the right direction but too optimistic.]
(I should note that I am not complaining about my comment being down-voted - that would both be against the rules and suggest that I cared in the slightest, which I do not.)
I only think that it's not bad that some comments try to explain the weak points of an article and try to get a more deep discussion.
This list is missing VCs.
Maybe if Steve Jobs would have not been mean, he would have accomplished even more great things ...
Of course, there are people who remain dickheads even after success (several were named here and I won't repeat) because they're either (a) so ambitious that they'll never have enough or (b) the meanness has become part of their "personal brands" but that's rare. Most people become more polished (and, superficially, nicer) when they're well-rested.
He still teaches maths, the way he used to do. There are still students in the 2nd Grade, they might think alike.
But then, I look back at him, his teachings(maths lessons) do not add value to me anymore.
On the other hand, there are mean people I know of amongst the meanest on earth. They do play tricks, figure out people who are inexperienced and trick them. They will keep doing the same, its in their genes. Those shameless jerks, will remain shameless. Desperate for success, by hook or by crook, and so will their off springs be. Desperate.
I disagree. Money is the lifeblood of any company. You need to be thinking about it at all times..or you will quickly find yourself in bankruptcy with a ton of debt.
Startup founders shouldn't only be driven by money, yes. But money should be one of the main factors driving them to succeed.
All of the ridiculous startup ideas I've seen were created by people that were not driven by money in any way and had no solid path to profitability (besides being purchased by a large company).