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"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.

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.

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.