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Comment by aartur | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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.

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