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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps pg and I have a different understanding of the word mean, but I doubt it as the opposing word he uses to describe the founders is "good people". These are just the ones coming to my head:

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.

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I think you make an excellent point, but all these cases are examples of guys who got a seat on a rocket and were pretty ruthless about who else got to ride.

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.)

some of them, yes, lucky once, no proven success after that. but not all.

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.

I'm afraid everyone giving robber barons and their ilk as counter-examples is misreading the essay. PG states that he works on the premise that a new non-zero-sum game of wealth creation is afoot, as exemplified by tech startups. In this specific context, being non-mean significantly improves success odds.

Everyone focuses on the last statement but misses the premise, which is a recurring theme in Graham's essays.

You mean, "never mind all those real-world examples, just look at this lovely theory!"

oh, that is clear. but that, let's say, "new economy" talk has been around for a long time and simply does not vibe with history, capitalism, human nature.

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,...

You're missing my point.

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.

I agree with you. I think the complete opposite is true. Very few successful CEOs aren't assholes are at least on the higher end of aggressive and ruthless.

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.

The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Is 'Mean People Fail' playing to people's fantasies?

http://48laws-of-power.blogspot.com/2011/05/law-32-play-to-p...

The only way pg's article makes any sense if is you read it as "successful people don't act like internet trolls in real life"

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)

Do they? I wonder if it just comes natural to them and they aren't thinking about what they can and can't get away with it.

On the contrary. I have read that Steve Jobs had the best (or worst) of both worlds.

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).

I can't believe you just put Linus is the same boat as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

You may not like how the man presents himself, but that is just flat out unfair.

I think you and pg are talking past each other. Here's the first sentence of his essay:

"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.

PG is also meeting these founders as a peer. Working in advertising, I've seen a lot of successful people who were perfectly nice to me, but terrors to underlings and people they felt were unimportant or incompetent (and much of of what was seen as incompetence was often the result of little communication from the top of the bureaucratic ladder).

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.

Indeed. One of the wisest pithy quotes I've ever read is from Dave Barry: "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."

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.

The most accurate summation of one's behavior is to see what happens when they believe they are not being watched. Asking the children of these startup founders would offer a different perspective, surely. There's hundreds and thousands of stories of famous people that behaved completely different at home than their public and professional images would suggest. In fact, sociopaths typically doing well in business very much helps explain the motivating factors for why people can be regarded so well professionally but hated by their families. But even at home we are probably different than how we are professionally anyway regardless of personality and I'm even different from employer to employer and for the purpose of the thread, that's really all that matters, doesn't it?

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.

"PG is also meeting these founders as a peer."

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.

He's also not relying on his own judgment of people's character:

"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.

That may be, but his opinion of his wife's "ability" isn't exactly unbiased. And if she came to the startup world from investment banking, she was also meeting the founders as either a peer or as someone who is beneficial to the founders access to money. Of course the "nobles" would be polite to each other, the question is how they treat the under classes.

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.

> That may be, but his opinion of his wife's "ability" isn't exactly unbiased.... 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.

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 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?

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.

I think we're talking past each other now.

> 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.

I think there are two questions that need to be answered before we can decide whether PG is correct or not.

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.

I'm just not that interested in either proving or disproving a general statement that I don't have sufficient evidence to adjudicate either way. Plus, how would pg even argue for it? "In YC W13, these ten founders were all total assholes and their startups all failed. These seventeen founders were really nice, and all seem to be doing well today. These four founders are ok but have a mean streak, two of them failed and two are actually doing well. In S13..." See what I mean? It's not the kind of point that lends itself to data-driven arguments with publicly available evidence, and it would have been really boring to read an essay that unfolded that way (and practically impossible for pg to get away with writing it).

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).

Actually I didn't shut my brain down, which I believe you did because of your reverence for all that is PG. The rational thing to do as a reader would have been to question his argument, but you never did, you just assumed because PG runs with founders that the scales have been lifted from his eyes.

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.

>the handful of tech CEO's you know only from reputation.

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.

I agree with most of your points, but I don't think you went far enough. From the moment we are born we do damage; all of us. Even your kindest most respected role model will step on a bug, unknowingly, just when going for a walk. And people do know they're doing this so it is being 'mean' if you're the bug.

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 can't help but think he deliberately held the internet back for 6 or 7 years for his own profit.

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.

I think, crucially, the point is that he wasn't 'not mean' when he was actually in charge of things at MS. He was actively horrible from the beginning; there've even been suspicions for years that MS-BASIC, the very thing the company started on, was stolen.

Bill is good now, in his old age with a wife who apparently had a big effect on that part of him. Previously, he was a ruthless and immoral businessman who saw no problem ruining people and lives to get ahead and illegally and unethically pressing his monopoly advantage to prevent and destroy competition. Don't confuse the nice old guy image you see now with the actual personality that created the worlds largest fortune. There aren't any billionaires that don't have many people who'd like to see them dead for the lives ruined by their ascent.

Whose lives did Gates destroy? Yes, Microsoft was engaged in very anti-competitive business practices, but being beaten in the market is not equivalent to having your life ruined. Also, not that this excuses any actions, but "it's not personal, it's just business" plays a factor here as well.

> Yes, Microsoft was engaged in very anti-competitive illegal business practices

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.

While I'm not saying that Bill Gates is or was 'nice', I take issue with the thought that something that is illegal is by definition something that makes a person 'not nice'. I've known my share of people who were engaged in very illegal practices and still, by my moral standards, nice, and even good.

Conflating morality with legality feels a bit easy to me. It's just not always true.

I'm not conflating them, what Bill did was both illegal and unethical. They are both true; sabotage is never the ethical choice and preventing your competitors from being able to play by strong arming retailers into selling only your product is unethical and illegal sabotage.

Gary Kildall, for one.

Anyone subject to NSA surveillance via Skype, Hotmail, Outlook.com etc. MSFT was the first company to participate in PRISM.

>Gary Kildall, for one.

That would be Bill Gates mother. She was buddy buddy with IBM CEO and she was the one convincing them to go with Microsoft.

I was curious about who Kildall was so I read the Wikipedia entry. Seems tl;dr when IBM wanted an OS Kildall was to busy to meet up and then charged $240 each for his CP/M-86 while Gates shipped a compatible PC-DOS for $40. Unsurprisingly Gates won the market. Kildall still ended up a multimillionaire who flew his own Learjet. However he became an alcoholic and died from a fall in a bar.

Dunno if it's accurate to say Gates destroyed his life. His main problems seems self inflicted.

I'm confused by your proposed definition of "mean." It sounds like you're just using it to mean "a net bad influence on the world," but to me it has a more specific meaning, something like "spiteful toward people in person." To me, there's no contradiction between being a very generous philanthropist and being mean.

Actually, in England, "mean" can also.. er, mean "miserly" or "not generous".

Indeed, but from context it seems pretty clear that Graham is using "mean" to refer to the attitude and tone of one's interaction with others, not one's generosity with money or resources.

It doesn't matter what Gates is like now. What matters, for this debate, is whether he was mean when he became successful. And from everything I know about the guy and his rise, if he can't be construed as "mean" at that time then this debate is mostly pointless.

Maybe the problem with this PG's post is that he did not define the term "mean".

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.

I don't know that it's a lack of remorse or empathy as much as it is good business sense.

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.

> 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.

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.

Internet Explorer 6's stagnation.

Microsoft is also the reason why people expect good browser technology to be essentially free and embedded in all things; the world as run by Netscape looks nigh-unto distopian in 2014 :(. They cared about CSS when Netscape didn't (who instead added a ton of proprietary extensions we now hate: the massive pile of presentation styling we now consider a dirge on HTML), and for that the W3C looked upon them very favorably. It also seems hard to blame them for letting IE6 stagnate when they were coming out of the anti-trust lawsuits, the ones where Netscape fought hard to defend their business model--which they lost. Microsoft is not a company that internally works on things because they are mission critical, but because they are fun and motivating to engineers. They backed CSS, invented AJAX, and forced JavaScript to be a multi-vendor standard rather than a competitive advantage of Netscape; they then had the gall to integrate it as an API and use it in their OS (something we now just assume any reasonable development environment will have), because they thought the web was the future. For more information, and some evidence, in case you don't remember all of this playing out at the time, I will refer you to this older comment thread :(. The world just isn't this black and white: none of these players come off very well; but if you want to measure impact to the world in dollars of agony, Microsoft's moves in the world of browser technology don't seem all that bad. (If you want to complain about Microsoft, complain about Office or DOS or something, not IE.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716596

seriously? Out of all crowds I would think anyone here would immediately get the terribleness of IE and how it had a huge impact on keeping the internet back. And IE's (diminishing) dominance has everything to owe to the monopoly Microsoft imposed on that space for a long time.

I cannot believe people still argue that bundling Internet Explorer with Windows was a BadThing™.

http://xkcd.com/1118/

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.

That comic does not suggest that it wasn't a bad thing. Just because worse things happen does not make less bad things into good things.

Apple does prohibit other browsers on their (iOS) platform. You can ship a "browser" app, but it must use their engine. You cannot bring your own. Alternate iOS browsers are basically just reskinned copies of Safari.

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.

> Apple does prohibit other browsers on their (iOS) platform.

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...

It's a reskinned Safari, as I said.

That wasn't the bad thing. Killing off the IE team when it hit 90+% marketshare and not releasing ANY new browser for more than five years... yeah. that was a bad thing.

Just neglecting to continue to develop a piece of software isn't exactly "inflicting billions of damage" on "humanity". Letting IE stagnate was a dumb move, but it's not like MS had a moral imperative to constantly improve it. Shame on the marketplace if it took a while for a feasible competitor to emerge.

Perhaps you're too young, but you don't seem to understand what MS did.

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).

I, for one, am happy not having to pay for my web browser.

And yet most software today is free. Yes, I was on the internet in that era. And no, I never did understand what was so awful about giving away software. All the software I write today I give away, too :-)

I guess I just don't see a direct correlation between what happened with MS in the late '90s and how web technologies have evolved (or not evolved) after that. Who's to say things wouldn't have been as bad (or worse) without IE?

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.

I agree with you. Netscape (4.0 iirc) was a horrible piece of software. MS originally went off on its own with IE because the standards bodies were so slow. It wasn't embrace and extend so much as it was ship working software. XML/XSL transformer in the browser, IE had that. Invention of AJAX, yep, IE also.

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.

Then Firefox amd Safari arose, and it didn't really work out well for Microsoft. I mean, I see that as Microsoft's mistake, not them setting the market back. And what if microsoft did keep pushing on IE at the time? Things might have been worse off now for it.

It wasn't so much IE in itself but the IE/Frontpage/ActiveX trinity they managed to make synonymous with enterprise for a while. It was a nasty time to work in the Internet space, especially for a web developer.

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.

Aren't Mozilla and Google giving away their browsers, too? What are the rules for deciding if giving away a browser is good or evil?

It's pretty straightforward -- if an evil agent does it, the act is evil; otherwise, it's good.

It always saddens me to think of how many people want to see this principle enshrined in law.

I'm 41 and lived through this era and totally disagree with the idea that Microsoft killed Netscape (I don't disagree that Microsoft wanted Netscape dead, I just firmly believe Netscape was doomed anyway).

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.

They released a free browser and then didn't innovate. You can paint the picture however you like for yourself, but I distinctly remember what it was like to try to develop anything in javascript for IE. It was beyond horrible. In their defence they did come up with Ajax which has been a boon of course.

Setting a standard for every browser to cost the end user nothing seems to have worked out pretty well for the Web and everyone on it.

Saying "IE sucks" in no way explains "the billions of damage he caused humanity" or "held the internet back for 6 or 7 years".

IE3 was a fantastic browser at a time when the only real alternative (Netscape Navigator) had become a bloated piece of shit.

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've competed in the compiler business against Microsoft from the very beginning. They are smart and tough competitors. But they were never, ever, mean. On the contrary, Microsoft has been invariably friendly and collegial towards my business, and helpful when I've asked for help, and this was from the beginning (the 80's) right up to the present.

for the younger folks here on HN I wanted to point out that Mr. Bright was the creator of the Zortech C and C++ compilers of old, as well as the co-creator of one of the most famous early computer strategy games of all time, Empire and Empire Deluxe. He would know whereof he speaks.

I personally used the Zortech tools in my C/C++ days, played Empire a ton, even written a few hobby clones of Empire.

So, not anything like Apple or DR DOS or Netscape that ever came near threatening MS.

So how is your compiler business today? Was it ever even remotely competitive with Microsoft strategy? no ? Thought so.

In fact you might call yourself lucky for not going into business with MS, or you would end up like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendo

Microsoft was a major blocker to the uptake of unix-like operating systems, using their market dominance to force hardware suppliers to ship equipment with an OS. Given that unix is frequently free (particularly for home users), you could claim that a significant portion of the literally hundreds of billions of dollars Microsoft made from Windows licensing does in fact constitute damage to humanity through paying for something they could have done without (though phrasing it as 'damage to humanity' sounds a bit more of a moral argument).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#T...

This argument would make every commercial competitor of free software as "evil". It would also imply that all humans should seize all commercial software development as soon as something free is available. This is obviously not true. People don't pay for things that they don't have to. Windows was much more user friendly operating system than *nix and despite of several of its shortcomings, it was fairly usable by huge swatch of non-technical people. This why people demanded it on their PC and directly or in-directly paid for it.

People don't pay for things that they don't have to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#T...

The same kind of thing happened 15 years later with UEFI and Secure Boot.

Do you actually know any of those people, or are you simply repeating media noise?

I'm not the OP, but have any of the accusations of "meanness" against Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Kalanick, Bezos, even Larry/Sergey, etc ever been denied? (And I don't necessarily mean by themselves, but say friends or co-workers.)

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".

I'm sure they've all done something mean at some point, but it's a mistake to believe you know someone based on a collection of sensationalized stories.

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...)

So you have truth or evidence otherwise, or are you just waving your hands and implying that you do? I mean if we really want to talk about truth or evidence, the correlation between sociopathic behaviors and business success is very well studied and documented, and lies in absolute contrast with this rather odd essay by PG.

What sort of evidence would convince you that someone isn't mean? I've know and worked with some of those people and not found them to be mean, but as other commenters have said, that makes no difference, because stories.

Sociopaths aren't mean to people they need something from and have no power over.

Clearly you already have your answer and anything I say will only provide you with more evidence of your own correctness. If they do something harsh, that proves they are mean. If they do something nice, that proves they are a manipulative sociopath, and mean.

I simply pointed out that the behavior of a sociopath is not defined by being nice but by self interest. That isn't controversial. So pointing out the kind, self-interested things a sociopath does is not meaningful in judging their character.

That's a general principle, I don't know about the particular cases you allude to.

Your first sentence doesn't exactly make your case more believable.

There's two conflating issues here - one's definition of "mean" and what level of experience gives one the right to determine someone as "mean".

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 Steve Jobs being mean comes from Walter Isaacson's biography. What would change my mind is if the witnesses mentioned in the biography came out claiming that the stories were fabricated. But if the stories are true, then he was a nasty person. That he may have been nice to some people does negate the nastiness to other people.

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.

Another way to look at it is that we all do some stuff that helps and benefits other people, and some stuff that fucks over other people. When you're a public figure, the stuff that fucks over other people ends up in a bestselling book.

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?

Personally, I don't believe that it's a useful distinction to classify a person as "mean" or "nice".

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.

> it's actually a genuine claim that so-called mean people don't succeed. That is absurd.

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.

So, I think this article is specious as well. I find that I rarely work with mean people, but that's because when someone is mean to me, I refuse to work with them. I assume that PG probably does the same thing (particularly if Jessica has the nose for character that the article says she does), and so the article could be entitled "PG is not a masochistic idiot". The same conclusion holds for anyone who has the freedom of who they associate with - the only people who regularly come in contact with mean people are those who have no means of escaping them, i.e. children, people who are so mean themselves that no nice person wants to associate with them, and people who are forced into a single position for economic reasons.

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.

I was once talking to a psychologist I know about corporate CEOs

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.

the correlation between sociopathic behaviors and business success is very well studied and documented, and lies in absolute contrast with this rather odd essay by PG

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.

> There's no point in arguing though. People will continue to believe what they want to believe regardless of truth or evidence.

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).

It's not a tactic, it's just a fact that people remember stories that confirm their prior beliefs and contrary evidence makes little difference.

If it makes you feel any better, I'm mostly criticizing myself for engaging in a pointless and unwinnable debate :)

There seems to be a widespread bias in thinking the mean/uncaring/strong individual dominates over the weak. Thus people are more likely to believe these types of stories or at least let it shape their idea of somebody.

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.

An alternative conclusion (or perhaps an additional) would be that extremely successful business-people whom the public widely believes to be "mean" don't take great effort to prevent the public from believing this. Perhaps at a certain point of power there is a benefit to having a reputation for ruthlessness?

The easiest way to cultivate a reputation for ruthlessness is to be ruthless...

No, but I agree with presty's comment. To add to it, to be completely honest, I think most people get to go through life with very few opportunities to do something mean. Startup founders, it probably happens every week. They are tempted, and tempted, and tempted. Even if you're good a lot of the time, at some point you're going to say:

"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.

I think you're confusing mean with something else. Firing an employ who is not performing is not mean. Mean, at least in the way I think pg is using it, is more like you see in YouTube comments, and everyone has plenty of opportunity to be mean like that (as evidenced by YouTube :). If anything, I think it's a sign of powerlessness.

No-one acts like they do in YT comments in real life, who would write that essay?

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.

I had several interactions with the current <company> CEO back when they were a very, very small operation, and while "asshole" might be too strong of a word, I got a very strong "I don't give a shit about you beyond what you can do for me" vibe. Does that qualify as "mean" as used in this essay? No idea.

Note: edited to remove identifying information.

Did he do or say anything mean to you?

Short answer is no, but it's as much what was not said, as what was. It's probably something akin to the "x-ray vision" experience. Mine is probably much weaker than jl's - it doesn't trigger that often, but when it does I am fairly confident in it.

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.

I don't think it's fair to tell a story like that without strong evidence to back it up.

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?

Agreed. I edited my comment to remove identifying info; would you mind updating yours also please? Thank you.

How are his vibes less credible than Jessica's?

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.

I didn't say anything about Paul or Jessica.

"I don't give a shit about you beyond what you can do for me"

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.

It partially comes back to what you mean by mean, but I'd argue that for Gates for instance directing a company engaging in illegal practices for years is objectively mean. Zuckerberg also had to settle lawsuit at great loss.

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.

Settling a lawsuit proves that you're a mean person. Ok. I guess I'm a mean person too.

You're right though that it comes down to definitions. I think the prevailing definition here is some closer to villain.

Knowing someone personally is obviously not the necessary standard to judge a person's character; I doubt it is the one you yourself use.

It depends whether we're debating the actual person, or the fictionalized character depicted in the media.

If you've never been on the other side of the news, you may not understand the difference.

I am well aware of media distortion. As with all news reporting and analysis the answer is not to withhold judgement (otherwise you could not make decisions) it is to use reasoning and experience to form an opinion and assess a confidence level to that opinion.

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".

Why wouldn't I defend "alleged misogynists"? In general, I find the lynch-mob culture here to be problematic and unhealthy. 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.

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.

> Why wouldn't I defend "alleged misogynists"?

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.

That's the trouble with mob justice, allegations equals guilt, and disagreement is socially indefensible.

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.

I don't think the implication that a reasonable person cannot often (not always) speak with high confidence about people we "know nothing about" is fair. Sometimes those reasonable conclusions will concur with the rabid mob, other times it won't.

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).

Paul, I get a sense that you have a keenly ingrained sense of morality and justice. What you may want to try is looking at fictional or hypothetical scenarios which depicts people's actions from an observer's point of view. Then compare the same facts coming from a friend's point of view.

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.

You do know about the 1930s phenomenon of diplomats and other prominenti flying home cooing about how Herr Hitler is greatly misunderstood? Personal acquaintance is not always a better way to judge someone's real character than the documentary evidence. Speaking of which: I'd have to dig to find the reference, but I've read (part of) a book by a psychologist at Microsoft. She stated that one of her official duties was to try to help people deal with their billg sessions. Pretty unusual even by the standards of high-level business meetings, yes? I feel embarrassed even mentioning SJ: let's begin with the 500-page official biography, which in turn corroborates (or sometimes just regurgitates) first-person accounts, books by fairly-well-regarded authors like Steven Levy and Michael S. Malone ... Are you meaning to include this kind of evidence under the category of 'media noise'?

I'm sure the biggest asshole in the world is sometimes nice to his friends. Do we need to know people to know whether they're mean, and why does pg get a free pass when he asserts that most drug lords must be mean while admitting he doesn't know any?

If Uber, as a company, strikes you as "not mean", you're delusional.

Creating 50k jobs a month (http://mashable.com/2014/09/08/uber-ceo-techcrunch-disrupt/), reducing transportation costs for millions and reducing DUIs. That strikes me as "not mean". But I guess I'm willing to look at the facts rather than sensational headlines written by people with a vested interest in an Uber competitor.

Personally, that strikes me as completely orthogonal to being nice or mean. Your statement makes as much sense as saying that Uber has created jobs so they must be purple.

Uber has done good for the world. I give that weight when trying to determine if they're good/bad mean/not mean. To me, they clearly care about people (they're trying to make things better for millions of riders and tens of thousands of new drivers ever month).

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?

"Mean" is about attitude, not outcomes. You can be a really nice person and be nothing but a drag on everything. You can be a complete asshole and improve the world.

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.

> But that doesn't mean that the people working within this arrangement are good people. Just working within that arrangement doesn't make them good/bad nice/mean. But I see the on-demand events to collect winter clothing for people in need. I've seen them do similar things over the past few years. I've seen them work hard to provide economic opportunities for tens of thousands of people. I'm not giving them any awards just for participating. I'm seeing a company working hard to change the world and doing it in a way that doesn't seem "mean". I see competitors crying about things being unfair (but I don't buy the argument because I'm of the opinion that private contractors should have all the opportunities they can get, not limited by non-compete agreements like we see in other industries). I see blogs masquerading as real journalism posting attack articles (which happens to coincide with reports that one of their competitors was upset that they weren't acquired by Uber and had threatened to go "nuclear"). What I don't see is enough to make me think they're "mean" or "bad". I guess I take the obvious attack pieces with a grain of salt (spurned competitors who are struggling are going to do everything they can to dirty Uber's name, that makes me think less of their competitors not Uber). It's possible that I'm missing something, but I haven't seen anything that would suggest they're actually mean, and I haven't met anyone who has an actual report that would suggest such a thing either.

Uber essentially needs to destroy an industry in order to shake it free of its long entrenched ways and rebuild it. Of course it's mean.

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).

Setting aside the specific ethics or lack of ethics of Uber, any successful "disruptive" business (as most successful startups are, and what many members of this forum seem to be aspiring to be) by definition destroys or at least diminishes the status-quo. It is very rare for a business to tap a truly green field market, where if successful they will not be diverting market share from established players. That is not being "mean." Uber is not primarily motivated to put traditional taxi companies out of business, or to put taxi drivers on the unemployment roles, though that may be a side effect of what they are trying to accomplish. Uber did not set out with an objective of destroying traditional taxi companies, they set out to provide a better implementation of that service. Calling this "mean" is like calling the winning team in a football game "mean" because they won. Well. That's the point. They set out to win the game. And it's very unlikely that those on the winning team don't have empathy for their counterparts on the losing team, because they have all been there from time to time. The goal is to win. That this means the other team loses is not the goal. It's a fine distinction in some cases, but an important one if you are going to start throwing around words like "mean." Being better than a competitor is not being "mean."

Contrast the "media noise" of Woz with Jobs.

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.

Most of CEOs you listed are of the biggest companies selling in the very competitive markets. It means that they succeeded because, in the first place, they were able to fight off competition. I don't think PG thinks about this kind of activity when he writes about startups. He writes that the amount of wealth is unlimited [0] so acquiring this kind of wealth actually does not involve "stealing" it from others. If you exclude the top and non-innovative companies I think that what PG writes about is true.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

> I don't think PG thinks about this kind of activity when he writes about startups

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.

I would not consider Zynga a success.

Mark Pincus and a few hundred million dollars of liquidated post-IPO Zynga stock beg to differ.

I wanted to oppose PG's view on what constitutes a startup to "normal" business practices, which involve fighting competition, networking with important people, hiring the cheapest workforce etc. In this kind of game being nice doesn't help. And you have to play this kind of a game when you are either not a startup (ie. not innovative) or big (because then you have competition and you also become a corporation in structure). And I think the companies from the parent comment succeeded because of these "normal" business practices.

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 :).

You are perhaps correct. Startups are new kind of business model where you might not have to be constrained by stiff competition. You can just create something awesome and be acquired by people who then turns it in to business and fends off the competition. But then again, this doesn't support pg's thesis in its totality that no one has to be mean. People who run actual businesses in very competitive space probably have fewer options as opposed to startup founder who just want to create something interesting and sell off as one-time event.

Yeah, his definition of mean clearly doesn't involve superficially charming sociopaths and narcissists. As long as the person can look attractive and chat personably during a dinner, or out for drinks, or be the center of attention at a meeting they're 'nice' and not 'mean'. Never mind the fact the whole time they're talking to you they're taking notes on where to slip the dagger in your back should that ever become necessary. I think his wife's x-ray vision is necessarily quite a bit off.

A member of my family is a retired psychologist who has treated many CEOs during his career. He once told me that "in [his] experience, most CEOs are sociopaths."

Selection bias? Perhaps the non-sociopaths don't come for treatment?

There is rigorous empirical research showing that psychopaths are more prevalent among the successful.

"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."

If they're invisible, how do the characteristics become known?

1. Researchers identify psychopaths using the rigorous statistical techniques of forensic psychology

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.

Because eventually you can look at a person and their history, zoom out a bit, and see the forest without the obstruction of trees. Sociopaths are effective manipulators, but don't form close relationships outside manipulation; they're impulsive and often irresponsible, which is why it's actually rare for them to be successful; when they are successful, you'll see a lot of individually maybe not-that-remarkable things blur together into a trail of broken lives left behind in their wake, and you can see how this person is truly not human, because they lack the most human thing of all -- empathy.

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.

Although there are a certain amount of psychopaths that can be detected, I'm almost positive that there are a huge amount psychopaths who go through life undetected.

There is also research pointing to this--including research proving that non-agreeableness (which is the same as meanness) correlates with increased salaries and business success.

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.

Non-agreeableness is not the same as meanness.

PG is sharing observations based on seeing hundreds of founders succeed or fail.

>Non-agreeableness is not the same as meanness.

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.

No, I don't have any knowledge of Big Five psychometric scales. I was going by the dictionary definition. And if I knew you were using a more technical term I would have looked it up, and still thought it was not the same as meanness:

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.

Those were copy-pastes so you can easily google what I wrote.

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)

I strongly agree with you. It looks like the effect is more "successful people get fans and apologists."

And here's the detail: "Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them. They can hire people who will put up with them because they need a job. But the best people have other options""

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.

> 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.

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.

Re: Sophistry - the key here is to look at the usage of the word "mean" when it is applied to kids fighting. When kids are being mean to each other in a fight, the opposite of them being mean is "good" and "benevolent".

My full comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674961

Just wondering, why do you put Kim Dot Com in there? I don't know anything about his "asshole-ness"

He's a career criminal:

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.

Isnt he now bankrupt though?

His assets were frozen during his most recent criminal investigation.

From your links, Kim Dotcom's "criminal career" seems to involve the Entertainment Industry like the RIAA and MPAA. Those organizations are questionable themselves. Best to be even handed about it and put those organizations on the same list as Kim Dotcom and Bill Gates.

The links mention 4 convictions that have nothing to do with the MPAA/RIAA/Mega.

The english coverage about him usually ignores the 90s.

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.

But Kim admitted his mistakes:

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."

Many of the above mentioned individuals run large foundations on the side, doing good. Many of them are married and have children. Some acknowledged bad behavior in the past.

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?)

Apologies for the low-content post, but it's funny yet sad how Larry Ellison needs no explanation.

> Will Bill Gates ever make up for the billions of damage he caused humanity by using underhand tactics to destroy his opposition? Maybe.

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.

>No he will not and cannot.

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.

It's not a high bar at all, it's simple decency. Gates is a net positive for the world, but that's beside the point and doesn't excuse his past wrongs. 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.

> and then apologize .. it doesn't make me a good person

That's exactly what will make you a better person. That's how it works.

Try reading what I said again, you utterly missed it. In my example, he didn't apologize to the person he hurt, he apologized to others.

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". If you honestly think this then you also think Ghandi and MLK are bad people, because they both did "bad" things to people who they didn't directly help. If I kill someone to save 1000 others I'm pretty obviously a good person, but I can never apologize to that person specifically or make it up to them. Your moral philosophy makes no sense.

Are you really this obtuse?

> 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.

Wait wait don't tell me. One of you happens to think that human beings are infinitely valuable and should respect certain rights and duties regardless of consequence and the other guy thinks that good and bad can be summed into some kind of.... utility function that can determine if you should do something or not.

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?

Morals sure as hell are math, just like everything else.

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.

> I was pointing out an extreme case where your reasoning breaks down

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.

Great analogy. I have yo use this whenever people talk about bill gates

However, doing evil when you're young and following up by a moral awakening in your second act is very good strategy. You get the benefits (money, power) from your youthful ruthlessness and then when you're older and wiser you can disavow your prior acts while continuing to benefit from it.

If it's a strategy, then you're still evil no matter how much charity your do when you're old.

Is there room for simple decency in business?

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.

If you punch me in the face and then apologize to me, your apologizing isn't enough to make you a good person or make up for punching me. So say instead you punch me in the face, and then dive into the river and save someone from drowning. While rescuing them doesn't make it up to me, it's still enough of a good thing that "gnaritas punches cbr in the face and saves X from drowning" is better than "gnaritas does nothing".

But maybe we're just getting into the semantics of what it means to "make up for" or "excuse" wrongs.

But there's no reason to combine the two. There are two separate statements: 1) gnaritas punches cbr in the face 2) gnaritas saves X from drowning. Unless you have a really weird mutation, you can do one without doing the other. If you happen to do both, that means you're a lifesaving asshole, not that you're a good person when you add it up.

I'm glad someone gets it. Morals aren't math, goods don't offset bads.

In many real situations good and bad things come together. For example, upthread we were talking about Gates (a) doing some aggressive, mean, and anticompetitive things to make a lot of money which (b) he now donates to do very valuable things. In his case (b) really was dependent on (a); if Microsoft hadn't made lots of money Gates wouldn't have been able to donate so much.

> In many real situations good and bad things come together.

Completely irrelevant to the points being made. No one is denying that.

That's retarded.

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.

You may have been downvoted for using "retarded" as an insult.

I downvoted you but I want to explain why. There are two things that irritated me about your post.

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?

> How many more people are employed in, say, southeast Asia doing MS support work and development than were "destroyed" in Microsoft's heyday?

Morality isn't math, good deeds don't excuse bad deeds simply by outnumbering them. The very foundation of your thinking is flawed.

That means if you are ever mean to one person, you can never make it up. By that definition everyone is forever mean.

No, it doesn't mean that at all. It means when you wrong a person, you have to make it up to that person. Doing good deeds for others doesn't excuse your past sins, you must make amends to those you wronged.

How exactly did Microsoft hold back the internet?

monopoly

During the entire time that Microsoft held this so-called monopoly---which was at most a monopoly on the desktop, not the servers or networks that most people think of as comprising "the internet"---Linux and other unix-like OSes continually made progress and now power the vast majority of the systems that provide the internet and indeed the devices we use to access it (tablets and phones).

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.

Abuse of monopoly power as detailed in the Findings of Fact in the DoJ's case against Microsoft:

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.

Sun, Vinod Khosla.

When successful people get together, they aren't usually "mean", or bad people. pg is successful, so his claim is naturally immature.

For the rest of us, it's pretty obvious that successful people are mean, for the most part. Here's a simple example: politicians.

Politicians, by definition, work for fights (arguments), not real things. PG mentions how unproductive fights are in his article, and (I think implicitly) says that fights are proportional to meanness.

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...

"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."

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.

The definition seems to involve being unsuccessful and/or purposelessly damaging to others. But sociopaths are not generally sadists; hurting others isn't the point, it's a side-effect.

Do you believe that competition is inherently "mean"? If you choose not to compete at your highest level and in turn are out-competed, what did you accomplish?

> 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.

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.

Your n=7 sample size is considerably smaller than pg's presumably n>=700. Be careful drawing conclusions from such a limited subset.

LOL :-) I like how you have no description next to Larry Ellison because it's simply self-evident... (yes and I agree with that)

Was going to say the same thing. :) With a perfect illustration: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BmjowqmCYAEgFFX.png

I don't know if it's a cultural difference or what else but your examples of meanness don't fit my definition at all.

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).

So, the ends justify the means?

No, I'm just making a point that being harmful or even cruel doesn't make someone mean. It's just a different kind of thing.

The home team is disruptive, but benevolent (to stakeholders). The away team is ruthless, and mean (to competition).

I like how Oracle requires no explanation.

In other words, good founders live by Game Theory?

What does nice really mean?

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.

Being nice is not antithetical to being competitive or being a pushover. I'd argue that being nice is crucial to being a strong good leader.

Nice usually means you are a pushover and will go out of your way to make other people happy.

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.

So let's say you're at this fork in the road:

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."

Your question is too vague to apply the rule. Let me give a concrete example:

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

Did you mean he did #1 or #2?

Sorry. #1. For some reason, I can't edit it. Guess too much time went by.

The problem isn't you, it's human nature.

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.

* I'm just saying that fair and nice are mutually exclusive over any given amount of time.*

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.

This has happened to me at least twice (Cellbots, OpenROV).

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.

Pump the brakes, man.

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.

I agree with you - like I said, I've never started a fight in my adult life. And I don't threaten to beat people up; that's for the weak; I tell people up front "If you are dishonest with me, you will not hear from my lawyer; I will kick your ass there and then".

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.

> I don't threaten to beat people up; that's for the weak; I tell people up front "If you are dishonest with me, you will not hear from my lawyer; I will kick your ass there and then".

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.

FWIW, that's how one of my closest friends feels about this - he believes I shouldn't post my opinions on HN in the first place, and just build rep by writing comments that go with the local milieu.

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'm not the strongest person. I probably don't have the ability to beat your face in if you welsh on a deal, and if you go nuts I'm at a bit of a disadvantage.

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.

I have no idea what you mean. Your friend thinks you shouldn't threaten people, or that you shouldn't tell HN that you threaten people?

That I shouldn't tell HN that I threaten people (I maintain that I don't, but I guess it was read that way), on ground of it being possibly bad for business.

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.

For the record, I have no idea who you are and no intention of finding out. I was describing how I would react if I received that self-description in person.

Well, ok, don't mind if I do.

"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.

Yeah, I kinda do have some demons chasing me. Again, I've never started a fight in my adult life (the last serious fight I ended was about a year and two months ago, don't try to steal my stuff and don't bring a knife to a wrestling match I guess). For sports, I used to do fencing (and be absolute crap at it, for the record, but that's not the point), haven't found something to get into yet, boxing doesn't sound like a bad idea, thanks.

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.

I've got two overarching points on dealing with toxic people (not limited to any particular flavor).

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.

Some people might call "I don't want to work at Google because a Google project manager told me to my face that my product didn't exist. So I wrapped his hand around it. It was a PCB with a lot of through-hole pointy bits, so it hurt him a satisfactory amount." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8644321) a violent act.

I would call it a very quick lesson in physics. If something doesn't exist, how can it be causing pain? It's very visceral. People can go as far as denying their eyes if facing with evidence they don't like, but very few will deny touch. An engineer ought to know better than to disrespect reality like that. A bit of pain in training, can save you a lot of pain in the field.

Most of the people you put in there are not mean. In fact they appear very open and friendly. Which is of course the personality type business rewards : superficial openness, fun and friendliness, but always ready to knife you in the back if the numbers say it should be done, without any delay. There's one other attribute they all have : they're programmers (except Marcus Pincus, Travis Kalanic of Uber was a coder). They technically know what they're doing, or asking others to do, a trait I've found incredibly rare in the corporate world.

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 ...)

What these guys who would be considered mean have in common is they all made difficult decisions for the betterment of the company and many of those decisions came with a very high price (eliminating competition meant alienating lots of potential future employees and firing anyone who dared present an opposing viewpoint meant taking away their ability to provide for their family).

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.

>> they all made difficult decisions for the betterment of the company

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.

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