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Comment by presty | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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...)

> 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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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...

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