And yet while there are clearly a lot of mean people out there, there are next to none among the most successful people I know. What's going on here?
You live in a society where successful people aren't mean. That's different from the rest of the world.
Maybe a more accurate title would be "Mean People Fail in Silicon Valley"
But there are at least big chunks of the world that mean people don't rule, and that territory seems to be growing.
I wish more of the essay was devoted to evidence of this, because it'd be amazing if true. But I don't personally see any evidence that mean people are becoming less influential.
When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists.
One specific counterexample: Gauss was extremely mean. And not only mean, but mean to his family:
Gauss eventually had conflicts with his sons. He did not want any of his sons to enter mathematics or science for "fear of lowering the family name".[36] Gauss wanted Eugene to become a lawyer, but Eugene wanted to study languages. They had an argument over a party Eugene held, which Gauss refused to pay for. The son left in anger and, in about 1832, emigrated to the United States, where he was quite successful. Wilhelm also settled in Missouri, starting as a farmer and later becoming wealthy in the shoe business in St. Louis. It took many years for Eugene's success to counteract his reputation among Gauss's friends and colleagues.
I feel bad pointing out a counterexample like this, because it's easy to cherrypick an example of a mean person here, a mean act there. More difficult to show a general trend. But isn't the difficulty of finding examples of nice people evidence that niceness isn't very pervasive, especially throughout history?
>Maybe a more accurate title would be "Mean People Fail in Silicon Valley"
Silicon Valley has the same proportion of mean, nasty, ugly people as anywhere else in the world. And some of these people are successful, just like everywhere else in the world.
I believe you can find quite a few "mean" people who is just working in the Silicon Valley as happy as ever. The correct rephrasal would be "Mean People Fail More".
It would be naive to think that getting along with people well, while being a remarkable trait, isn't the only thing that leads to success. There are a lot of variables controlling that. It's just common sense that if you are good with people, you are more likely to be successful.
Lastly, I believe a lot of people will be spraying this thread with counterexamples as you did, but the greatest example of PG's argument is the one of the people who gave the world the Silicon Valley [1]. He could have been one of the most cherished person of the past century, he could have all the wealth he wanted, but instead he practically died alone, leaving many people with hatred towards him. Because he was "mean".
Your examples hardly show that Gauss was mean. He disagreed with his children about the path they should take in life. Most parents do. Gauss probably had a realistic appreciation of his sons' abilities. And why should parents be expected unconditionally to pay for their childrens' extravagances. Maybe the money was needed for something more important?
Specifically the last sentence: It took many years for Eugene's success to counteract his reputation among Gauss's friends and colleagues.
As a parent, you just don't do that to your children. Apparently Gauss badmouthed him regularly, to the point where he acquired a reputation outside of the family.
I think part of the general confusion is that "mean" and "fail" are both hard to define.
Maybe CF Gauss had a realistic appreciation of his son's personality. I don't know. Why should parents lie about their children?
You are projecting contemporary parental attitudes where little darling cannot possibly do / be wrong on somebody who lived more than 2 centuries earlier, and had six children.
I was wondering about pg's use of the word ruthless in this context - wouldn't one equate 'ruthless' to the extremity of meanness? There was a link here to The Loneliest Genius [1] about Newton - The servants celebrated his parting, not because they were happy for him, but because he had always treated them harshly. His personality was, they declared, fit for nothing but the university... Didn't the eccentricity of many intellectuals manifest itself as cruelty or meanness?
This sure sounds nice, and I believe Paul when it comes to his perception. But I'd need more convincing that this is objectively and not just something Paul sees because he's good at filtering out the people he doesn't want to work with.
A couple counterexamples come to mind. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and the Uber executive team, the Github husband and wife with the Horvath incident. Of course I can't generalize these cases either, but these are prominent companies where the truism doesn't hold.
Don't forget Vinod Khosla. From reading HN one could also be forgiven far thinking that every single amazon employee in management outside AWS is devoid of all positive human traits.
Forget Uber driver, what about a code monkey at some YC startup? I've seen the cable show "Undercover Boss" a handful of times and they manage to sneak in company founders with some minimal, reasonable makeup techniques.
Imagine pg entering some RoR shop (or better, Clojure) and getting his code reviewed by a CTO who's a few years out of college.
Do you actually work at a RoR or Clojure shop, or are you speaking from "cable show watching experience" ? Having worked at a number of such places in the Valley, the number of times I've been told that I can't go home or to lunch or whatever until such-and-such a thing is done has been zero.
Now, a finance startup in New York where the stack is Java and .NET? Absolutely.
I meant it would be funny more from a technical perspective regarding his history with Lisp and as something of a programming luminary, other commenters appear to be talking more about brutal work schedules.
That is false. There was no court of law. The internal investigation found that there was no substance to the allegations of sexual harassment, but there was evidence of other inappropriate behaviour (mostly letting his wife Theresa use Github resources // pressure employees (though she didn't think of it that way) into helping with her charity project).
The inappropriate behaviour doesn't sound like enough to fire a CEO, but I'm guessing they realised that the feminist brigades would not rest until they tasted blood and they decided to do the "roll over and play nice" thing, as you do when you have a fiduciary duty to your investors.
Must've been really gutting for Tom to be forcefully removed from his own company on bullshit grounds, though.
(before you say "I don't believe Github's account" - the equally valid retort is "I don't believe the accuser's account" - she seems to have had a really huge axe to grind with someone in this)
The court thing was apparently me getting mixed up with the Tinder executive sexually harassing another woman. I guess TPW was only subject to an "internal probe" by Github after which he stepped down because of his apparently crazy wife's actions getting involved in company affairs. Which is legally sexual harassment as well, even if it never went to court.
So I have to honestly retract my statement about him being found to legally be a sexually harasser, which he has not been found to be so. He just appears to be so from everything I've read about the situation.
Thanks for clarifying your statement. Imho it's worth reading through both sides of the case with an open mind. I believe the only sensible conclusion is that at least one side is lying very unashamedly.
So on one side you have a multitude of people at Github, including presumably lawyers, HR people, founders, etc. On the other side, you have one person who has allegedly been wronged.
We can't know which side is lying, so I won't suggest which one is lying, though obviously I have my opinion on the matter. I will however state where that opinion comes from: I know from reading about Github's culture that it is a very open culture, which seems to show a deep respect for individuals. Creating this sort of culture doesn't happen by accident. It takes a lot of consistent work over a period of years (I know that because I'm trying to create that sort of culture in my company, and it's not easy at all - there are countless reasons to abort and build a standard, closed culture). To me, what is being alleged by the accusing party is not congruent with the kind of character that would build an open culture.
Obviously you're free to have the opposite opinion, and I respect your right to form your opinion on this matter based on your own beliefs, preconceptions, etc, just as I base my own opinions on my own beliefs and preconceptions.
I think it's important that this respect is mutual, though, and that we both realise we're talking about opinions here, not facts.
There was another side to the story - https://medium.com/@geeekcore1/facts-conveniently-withheld-d... I don't think any of us in the peanut gallery can really know if Tom Preston is a good or bad person, without knowing what really happened from the inside, and without knowing who is lying or spinning and who is telling the truth.
I would love to believe what pg is saying. However there are strong counter points to his arguments.
Uber and Travis Kalanick don't seem to be failing. They may have some negative publicity, but their growth is strong. Uber is probably worth more than any single yc company including Airbnb.
I don't disagree with this. Organized crime actually serves a legitimate community function in its early stages usually. They always get their hands dirty.
Is that really someone that you'd want to emulate though?
You could make the case that Freeway Rick Ross is a really nice guy because he never had to use violence, but he still sold crack to people.
Nevada just outlawed Uber. More generally,
Uber stands to encounter a lot of legal push-back.
(2) Competition.
In e-mail of Sat 11/22/2014 12:20 PM,
CBinsights reported that Uber has "27 alternatives".
(3) Localism.
Yes, maybe in each city, something like
Uber, if successful, could have
a network effect that would let
it have a barrier to entry: That is,
since all the drivers use Uber, all the
riders do; and since all the riders do,
all the drivers do.
But,
the taxi business is geographically local
so that success by, say, Uber in Boston
does next to nothing to help Uber compete
in NYC, Atlanta, Chicago, SF, LA, etc.
So, in each city, Uber can be attacked
by local competitors.
I think that to run something like Uber you have to be Travis. There is a lot of money in destroying the taxa monopoly so that would override the cost of being mean.
The taxi monopoly is really more of a government monopoly than a business one. This is especially true in NYC. Sure, big companies own groups of medallions and single owners hadn't been able to get one (until this year) for 20+ years, but medallions are very illiquid assets. The resale value on them is much less than what the city gets for new ones issued at auction.
There's tons of state-controlled monopolies out there if you look hard enough.
To make the case stronger we now need to move some few prominent "mean" tech figures to "not mean".
Could it be that meanness and failure come in a vicious circle fortifying each other? Put in another way, as people become more successful they become less mean? Hypothetically, the Paul Graham of the failed startup accelerator YC would end up being meaner.
Many homeless people end up appearing mean too. Maybe personal traits aren't innate unchangeable attributes but depend on our current status.
I'm curious to know pg's thoughts on Mahbod Moghadam (although I expect that there are several reasons he'd be unable to make that public anytime soon, if ever). Did he miss the meanness when he funded Rap Genius? Is his behavior something else entirely that "mean" doesn't capture?
I've never met him, so I can't say he's been mean to _me_. But I feel like if I were family of Elliot Rodger or his victims or a loss prevention officer at Whole Foods, I'd consider "mean" as a possible descriptor.
Anyway, that's kind of what I wanted to ask: is there a sufficient dichotomy there, such that someone without a well-developed sense of empathy or fairness can be successful by avoiding being outright mean? (And is that a good thing?)
Great to see PG trying counter Steve Jobs inspired asshole-dolatry. Certainly I think it accords with my experience: I've stuck around in jobs because of the people when better ones were available. Conversely, meanness in founders creates a mean atmosphere, and people will not be loyal.
"I've stuck around in jobs because of the people when better ones were available."
But is that really in your best interest?
The way this is stated this is how it breaks down:
- I have a better job opportunity (all things equal meaning
presumably there are nice people at that job as well at least
potentially) that I have passed on.
- The people at my current job are nice to me and/or
my boss is nice to me and/or is not an asshole
In the above case it seems that you have been disadvantaged by
a loyalty that isn't based on anything concrete simply
because you like the people and/or the way you are treated.
Under that premise you might be a programmer at the local
small 10 person wholesaler and have a great boss and a great working
environment and/or a sense of loyalty because of how well you
are treated. And completely miss an opportunity (assuming of
course such opportunity is important to you) to work for a much larger
company with much more opportunity. Or take someone teaching at a small
community college who passes up a potential job at a major university
(once again assuming that is a better career path).
My point being that loyalty and a nice environment and the
people that you work with are certainly
great benefits but can also be in a sense golden handcuffs from
progressing further in your career.
The first five comments I read more or less all disagreed with pg's basic premise. Whether or not those people are even right, that's quite depressing in and of itself.
I'm not sure if you've replied to my comment unintentionally, but I fail to see where what I've written lacks civility or even expresses disagreement; it is simply an observation.
(I should note that I am not complaining about my comment being down-voted - that would both be against the rules and suggest that I cared in the slightest, which I do not.)
I would not say meanness, I would rather consider humility, the ability to be humble, to make abstractions of animal emotions.
There are different kinds of success. There is victory, and there's progress. In victory, you prove you're relatively better than others. In progress, you allow the whole society to lift itself into something that is just better.
That's true that you should not put money on a pedestal, but you should also understand that in order to do a better job, you should adopt a profit model just because you're in a capitalist country.
Of course mean people fail. Mean people don't have any intention or long term goal for what they want to do in their field of work, they lack strategy.
But on the other hand, hell is paved with good intentions.
This is a very interesting idea. I think this is "becoming more true" rather than "true." Part of the reason why I think this will never completely be the case is that starting a company involves getting lots of people to do "stuff" and there isn't just one method to do so. Being a masterful manipulator of others, right or wrong, has worked many times in the past and I doubt will ever stop working by its very nature. (Now, being an average manipulator just won't cut it...) The bar will be continually raised as long as good people continue to start companies. Hopefully this new culture doesn't fizzle out after the next funding crunch, whenever it may occur.
I know that the author only means to give advice. But the message can easily be misinterpreted into a generalization, which kind of makes the author seem like a mean person.
> Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things.
I don't think the fighting has gone anywhere. It's just changed its form. Any founder/salesperson will tell you it's harder than ever to get a prospect's or consumer's attention.
Being nice has nothing to do with the ageless struggle to stand out and triumph...grit.
Which, if you lack it, is the only trait I believe one can say is a sure shot to failure.
Indeed , academia almost pushes people to be mean. In general, wherever there's politics instead of an objective (like an experiment), or semi-objective (like a free market) measure of success, people tend to be mean.
Agree on not being mean. I don't even understand how it could be considered reprehensible? She's a successful, smart, black woman, raised in the deep south by educator parents. Her success is to be lauded. I'd think the pages of the more liberal HN would be the place her success could be appreciated.
I suppose it depends on your political views. She was a core part of the administration that invaded an entire country on false premises and resulted in thousands of deaths.
Good point about the rest of her story though – she is a successful women and came from statistically unlikely circumstances.
Tough to balance those things out. In my view the participation in war crimes outweighs all other possible successes.
Edit: forgot to mention her role in authorizing torture.
>> administration that invaded an entire country on false premises
"Clinton also stated that, while other countries also had weapons of mass destruction, Hussein is in a different category because he has used such weapons against his own people and against his neighbors."
Are you publicly accusing Condalizza Rice of war crimes? Do you have proof? Does HN support your claims and are willing to fight a legal battle on your behalf or testify in your defense?
Condoleezza Rice has been instrumental in pushing for the US government to bypass personal privacy on the internet, and they hired her to help run a company that stores people's private documents on the internet. How does that make sense?
Her involvement in the Iraq war, the Bush torture program, and so on are also reprehensible in my personal opinion, but in this case we can leave those aside; I would think that her position on warrantless wiretaps alone would be sufficient for anyone who cares about privacy to want her kept far away from Dropbox.
(And there's nothing about being liberal that requires one to mindlessly support everything any woman or minority says or does. It does you no credit to hold such a childishly simplistic view of your political opponents.)
the inclusion of professors in the list of people who generally aren't mean people is... questionable. being a professor means playing many zero sum games: limited government grants for research, limited number of jobs in academia. perhaps they're nice to pg, but they're often mean to their grad students and postdocs, and to anyone else who doesn't control a scarce resource and who gets in their way.
I completely agree, and that casts a lot of the rest of the piece into question. I've worked in academia for years and I laughed out loud (and bitterly, I might add) at that.
Yeah, I've had some professors who were quite mean to students (A small amount though, maybe 2-3, most seem to care about their students, at least at my university). I think what PG sees instead is that the people he interacts with aren't mean to him because he has power over them, so he assumes they treat everyone the same way.
if you're at harvard, that's probably why you've only seen a "small amount" of mean professors. try a college where most professors have achieved nothing and are having a midlife crisis.
Some of the professors I know are basically mobsters. They threaten to have people fired if they don't walk the walk the prof. wants them to walk, they operate in rigged peer-reviewing committees, when sitting on grant review committees they fund their friends even when their grant proposals are bad; and give bad scores to proposals from folks they don't like.
The more I stay in academia, the more I find out this is normal. Especially on the top, especially in elite universities.
This is disheartening particularly to me because I used to work in corporate, and I used to think then "boy, my work is not being fulfilled here". Now I come here and find out it's backstabbing all the way. I find out that the only way for me to get ahead is by taking sides, being a suck-up, and doing the dirty work the professors want me to do. The professors who've gotten ahead, they know this and basically orchestrate the game.
There are plenty of counterexamples, also in Silicon Valley. For example, both Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins made a lot of money, but depending on which side you believe, at least one of them is mean.
Anyway, the basic message is correct: when it comes to startups, it pays of more to focus on baking a bigger cake, than on fighting for a bigger slice.
I think PG is conflating the personal spite of Internet trolls with the ruthless drive to acquire wealth that marks out investment bankers, warlords and drug dealers. The latter might do some very nasty or underhanded things, but they regard it as "just business", as opposed to the personal bile you get from trolls.
Trollery is certainly not conducive to success because it destroys trust between you and the people you need to work for you. But if you can create a trusting circle of cronies then together you can lead them to do great but terrible things.
Mean is an umbrella term that could be a lot of things, including ruthless. I'll use parallel analogies to make my point: Mean is to Martial Arts as Ruthless is to Goju Ryu Karate.
1) People are usually mean (or meaner) to subordinates -- so not much reason to be mean to PG for most people he meets.
2) Most succesfull people are also good at PR and pretending to be nice to everybody, especially somebody like PG, but in general too. They can still be very mean in covert ways.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the nineties, he operated Mailboxes and Partylines and was known for logging and reading all traffic to gain knowledge about current weaknesses of software. During a house search "hundreds of faked credit- and phonecards" were found.
He later cooperated and gave a lot of the info he gathered to the police. He worked closely with Günther von Grevenreuth, a very well known - but not highly regarded - attorney in german hacker circles.
Now, I appreciate that this is a rather sketchy description for a decade, but don't ask people from that time about Dotcom and expect to hear praises. He's neither well-liked, nor to be relied on or trusted.
Dotcom also wrote: "I made mistakes when I was young and I paid the price. Steve Jobs was a hacker and Martha Stuart [sic] is doing well after her insider trading case. I think over a decade after all of this happened it should NOT be the dominating topic. I am 37 years old now, I am married, I have three adorable children with two more on the way (twin girls – yeah) and I know that I am not a bad person. I have grown and I have learned."
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?)
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.
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]
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 ...)
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 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)
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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".
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
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.
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."
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."
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.
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.
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:
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 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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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".
This is really really funny. The only person I could imagine writing this before I saw this was Michael dell. Most people around the world who worked for him have nothing good to say about him. And he is another one who was caught for doing illegal business practices.
This essay seems to spend quite a bit of time talking about a term that it never defines. And, assuming there's a definition, does meanness count if it is not made manifest? I think we can probably agree without a more specific definition that a sociopath is mean, but are they only mean if we catch their sociopathy? And if we consider aggression a mean behavior, is aggression universal, or is behavior only aggression in certain contexts?
Particularly the example of Buurtzorg, a Dutch healthcare provider, is quite convincing: They went from 0% to 80% market-share by basically being less mean to their employees and clients.
Yikes this is clearly wildly inaccurate wishful thinking. If history has shown us anything, it is that the worst usually rise to the top. Nice sentiment by pg, but simply horribly untrue.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadYou live in a society where successful people aren't mean. That's different from the rest of the world.
Maybe a more accurate title would be "Mean People Fail in Silicon Valley"
But there are at least big chunks of the world that mean people don't rule, and that territory seems to be growing.
I wish more of the essay was devoted to evidence of this, because it'd be amazing if true. But I don't personally see any evidence that mean people are becoming less influential.
When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists.
One specific counterexample: Gauss was extremely mean. And not only mean, but mean to his family:
Gauss eventually had conflicts with his sons. He did not want any of his sons to enter mathematics or science for "fear of lowering the family name".[36] Gauss wanted Eugene to become a lawyer, but Eugene wanted to study languages. They had an argument over a party Eugene held, which Gauss refused to pay for. The son left in anger and, in about 1832, emigrated to the United States, where he was quite successful. Wilhelm also settled in Missouri, starting as a farmer and later becoming wealthy in the shoe business in St. Louis. It took many years for Eugene's success to counteract his reputation among Gauss's friends and colleagues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss
I feel bad pointing out a counterexample like this, because it's easy to cherrypick an example of a mean person here, a mean act there. More difficult to show a general trend. But isn't the difficulty of finding examples of nice people evidence that niceness isn't very pervasive, especially throughout history?
Silicon Valley has the same proportion of mean, nasty, ugly people as anywhere else in the world. And some of these people are successful, just like everywhere else in the world.
It would be naive to think that getting along with people well, while being a remarkable trait, isn't the only thing that leads to success. There are a lot of variables controlling that. It's just common sense that if you are good with people, you are more likely to be successful.
Lastly, I believe a lot of people will be spraying this thread with counterexamples as you did, but the greatest example of PG's argument is the one of the people who gave the world the Silicon Valley [1]. He could have been one of the most cherished person of the past century, he could have all the wealth he wanted, but instead he practically died alone, leaving many people with hatred towards him. Because he was "mean".
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley
As a parent, you just don't do that to your children. Apparently Gauss badmouthed him regularly, to the point where he acquired a reputation outside of the family.
I think part of the general confusion is that "mean" and "fail" are both hard to define.
You are projecting contemporary parental attitudes where little darling cannot possibly do / be wrong on somebody who lived more than 2 centuries earlier, and had six children.
[1] http://nautil.us/issue/19/illusions/the-loneliest-genius (paywall)
A couple counterexamples come to mind. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and the Uber executive team, the Github husband and wife with the Horvath incident. Of course I can't generalize these cases either, but these are prominent companies where the truism doesn't hold.
Don't make me laugh about some pathetic losers like TPW and wife. They're bullies and they got what they deserved, if not enough.
Imagine pg entering some RoR shop (or better, Clojure) and getting his code reviewed by a CTO who's a few years out of college.
Now, a finance startup in New York where the stack is Java and .NET? Absolutely.
GitHub reached 150 employees without having anyone quit, which hardly seems likely if the Founder and CEO is mean.
https://twitter.com/holman/status/303576839132164097
A reputation should be accurate, should it not?
That is false. There was no court of law. The internal investigation found that there was no substance to the allegations of sexual harassment, but there was evidence of other inappropriate behaviour (mostly letting his wife Theresa use Github resources // pressure employees (though she didn't think of it that way) into helping with her charity project).
The inappropriate behaviour doesn't sound like enough to fire a CEO, but I'm guessing they realised that the feminist brigades would not rest until they tasted blood and they decided to do the "roll over and play nice" thing, as you do when you have a fiduciary duty to your investors.
Must've been really gutting for Tom to be forcefully removed from his own company on bullshit grounds, though.
(before you say "I don't believe Github's account" - the equally valid retort is "I don't believe the accuser's account" - she seems to have had a really huge axe to grind with someone in this)
I can't get to 500 points fast enough...
Because dissenting views should be silenced. I'm sure you think you're a nice guy too.
The court thing was apparently me getting mixed up with the Tinder executive sexually harassing another woman. I guess TPW was only subject to an "internal probe" by Github after which he stepped down because of his apparently crazy wife's actions getting involved in company affairs. Which is legally sexual harassment as well, even if it never went to court.
So I have to honestly retract my statement about him being found to legally be a sexually harasser, which he has not been found to be so. He just appears to be so from everything I've read about the situation.
So on one side you have a multitude of people at Github, including presumably lawyers, HR people, founders, etc. On the other side, you have one person who has allegedly been wronged.
We can't know which side is lying, so I won't suggest which one is lying, though obviously I have my opinion on the matter. I will however state where that opinion comes from: I know from reading about Github's culture that it is a very open culture, which seems to show a deep respect for individuals. Creating this sort of culture doesn't happen by accident. It takes a lot of consistent work over a period of years (I know that because I'm trying to create that sort of culture in my company, and it's not easy at all - there are countless reasons to abort and build a standard, closed culture). To me, what is being alleged by the accusing party is not congruent with the kind of character that would build an open culture.
Obviously you're free to have the opposite opinion, and I respect your right to form your opinion on this matter based on your own beliefs, preconceptions, etc, just as I base my own opinions on my own beliefs and preconceptions.
I think it's important that this respect is mutual, though, and that we both realise we're talking about opinions here, not facts.
Uber and Travis Kalanick don't seem to be failing. They may have some negative publicity, but their growth is strong. Uber is probably worth more than any single yc company including Airbnb.
I think displacing the resident population of SF is pretty mean, as is creating a monoculture there.
Apathy matters.
"Criminals" are also good at being mistaken as mean people when they are really good.
Is that really someone that you'd want to emulate though?
You could make the case that Freeway Rick Ross is a really nice guy because he never had to use violence, but he still sold crack to people.
Good point. Is he "mean" or not? More curiously, is he "successful" or not?
(1) Legal.
Nevada just outlawed Uber. More generally, Uber stands to encounter a lot of legal push-back.
(2) Competition.
In e-mail of Sat 11/22/2014 12:20 PM, CBinsights reported that Uber has "27 alternatives".
(3) Localism.
Yes, maybe in each city, something like Uber, if successful, could have a network effect that would let it have a barrier to entry: That is, since all the drivers use Uber, all the riders do; and since all the riders do, all the drivers do.
But, the taxi business is geographically local so that success by, say, Uber in Boston does next to nothing to help Uber compete in NYC, Atlanta, Chicago, SF, LA, etc. So, in each city, Uber can be attacked by local competitors.
There's tons of state-controlled monopolies out there if you look hard enough.
Could it be that meanness and failure come in a vicious circle fortifying each other? Put in another way, as people become more successful they become less mean? Hypothetically, the Paul Graham of the failed startup accelerator YC would end up being meaner.
Many homeless people end up appearing mean too. Maybe personal traits aren't innate unchangeable attributes but depend on our current status.
Also didn't Mahbod try and excuse his behavior with a brain tumor or something? That's actually reasonable...
Anyway, that's kind of what I wanted to ask: is there a sufficient dichotomy there, such that someone without a well-developed sense of empathy or fairness can be successful by avoiding being outright mean? (And is that a good thing?)
But is that really in your best interest?
The way this is stated this is how it breaks down:
- I have a better job opportunity (all things equal meaning presumably there are nice people at that job as well at least potentially) that I have passed on.
- The people at my current job are nice to me and/or my boss is nice to me and/or is not an asshole
In the above case it seems that you have been disadvantaged by a loyalty that isn't based on anything concrete simply because you like the people and/or the way you are treated.
Under that premise you might be a programmer at the local small 10 person wholesaler and have a great boss and a great working environment and/or a sense of loyalty because of how well you are treated. And completely miss an opportunity (assuming of course such opportunity is important to you) to work for a much larger company with much more opportunity. Or take someone teaching at a small community college who passes up a potential job at a major university (once again assuming that is a better career path).
My point being that loyalty and a nice environment and the people that you work with are certainly great benefits but can also be in a sense golden handcuffs from progressing further in your career.
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
I think that disagreeing comments are not discouraged, if they are civil and if possible have a strong technical argument.
[Note: I upvote the submission, and a few of the disagreeing comments, because I think the article is in the right direction but too optimistic.]
(I should note that I am not complaining about my comment being down-voted - that would both be against the rules and suggest that I cared in the slightest, which I do not.)
I only think that it's not bad that some comments try to explain the weak points of an article and try to get a more deep discussion.
There are different kinds of success. There is victory, and there's progress. In victory, you prove you're relatively better than others. In progress, you allow the whole society to lift itself into something that is just better.
That's true that you should not put money on a pedestal, but you should also understand that in order to do a better job, you should adopt a profit model just because you're in a capitalist country.
Of course mean people fail. Mean people don't have any intention or long term goal for what they want to do in their field of work, they lack strategy.
But on the other hand, hell is paved with good intentions.
I don't think the fighting has gone anywhere. It's just changed its form. Any founder/salesperson will tell you it's harder than ever to get a prospect's or consumer's attention.
Being nice has nothing to do with the ageless struggle to stand out and triumph...grit.
Which, if you lack it, is the only trait I believe one can say is a sure shot to failure.
Steve jobs, bill gates, uber, dropbox, zygna. I guess those are all exception?
I moved to self hosted owncloud as a result.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice#Early_life
Good point about the rest of her story though – she is a successful women and came from statistically unlikely circumstances.
Tough to balance those things out. In my view the participation in war crimes outweighs all other possible successes.
Edit: forgot to mention her role in authorizing torture.
"Clinton also stated that, while other countries also had weapons of mass destruction, Hussein is in a different category because he has used such weapons against his own people and against his neighbors."
http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/
"participation in war crimes"
Are you publicly accusing Condalizza Rice of war crimes? Do you have proof? Does HN support your claims and are willing to fight a legal battle on your behalf or testify in your defense?
(for example, the US was found guilty over Nicaragua and basically just ignored it)
Her involvement in the Iraq war, the Bush torture program, and so on are also reprehensible in my personal opinion, but in this case we can leave those aside; I would think that her position on warrantless wiretaps alone would be sufficient for anyone who cares about privacy to want her kept far away from Dropbox.
(And there's nothing about being liberal that requires one to mindlessly support everything any woman or minority says or does. It does you no credit to hold such a childishly simplistic view of your political opponents.)
The more I stay in academia, the more I find out this is normal. Especially on the top, especially in elite universities.
This is disheartening particularly to me because I used to work in corporate, and I used to think then "boy, my work is not being fulfilled here". Now I come here and find out it's backstabbing all the way. I find out that the only way for me to get ahead is by taking sides, being a suck-up, and doing the dirty work the professors want me to do. The professors who've gotten ahead, they know this and basically orchestrate the game.
Anyway, the basic message is correct: when it comes to startups, it pays of more to focus on baking a bigger cake, than on fighting for a bigger slice.
Trollery is certainly not conducive to success because it destroys trust between you and the people you need to work for you. But if you can create a trusting circle of cronies then together you can lead them to do great but terrible things.
Edit To Downvoters: I am not being randomly flippant. Larger explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674961
2) Most succesfull people are also good at PR and pretending to be nice to everybody, especially somebody like PG, but in general too. They can still be very mean in covert ways.
Apple, Steve Jobs, widely known for being an asshole. Fucked over early employees.
Facebook, Zuck, completely fucked over his mates when money appeared.
Microsoft, Bill Gates, ruthlessly exterminated opposition and known for bullying staff.
Oracle, Larry Ellison
Zynga, Marcus Pincus, "I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues".
Uber, acting like complete dicks.
Kim Dotcom, nuff said.
I think once you've been mean/ruthless/evil in business you may come out the other side and do some nice things, but you have to ask, will it ever be enough? Will Bill Gates ever make up for the billions of damage he caused humanity by using underhand tactics to destroy his opposition? Maybe. But while everyone praises him at the moment, I can't help but think he deliberately held the internet back for 6 or 7 years for his own profit. You almost can't start calculating the damage he caused precisely because it is so mind boggling.
Perhaps you don't agree with me, but imho this is the most bizarre essay I've read by pg, and I really don't agree with most of his political leanings, so for me that's saying a lot.
The truly great startup founders have to be nice on the outside but when push comes to shove, complete assholes on the inside. And of course investors are going to see the nice side.
Edit: And it occurs to me, funnily enough pg seems to be one of the major counterexamples, a good founder, as when he setup YC it was a game changer because here was a rich dude taking time out to help a bunch of young people and then put his money where his mouth was when people started asking him "so where do we get this seed funding". It was so remarkable because he actually took the time.
Edit 2: There seems to be some debate on the meaning of "mean". I'd point to pg's own essay on philosophy to dismiss this sophistry. He uses "good" and "benevolent" as the opposites, not "polite" or "diplomatic". I also appreciate BG created trillions of value, so he's definitely an overall net +ve, but he destroyed as well as created.
First, the degree to which he "held back" the internet, when contrasted with what Microsoft did positively for home computing and the internet, is debatable.
Second, if Bill Gates can't be construed as a good person doing good things in the world-- as "not mean"-- then this debate is mostly pointless.
Fixed that for you. It's just business applies to legal business, not illegal anti-competitive tactics. Competition is beating the other guy, not preventing him from being able to play by locking him off the field. So no, it doesn't play a factor here, not at all.
Conflating morality with legality feels a bit easy to me. It's just not always true.
Anyone subject to NSA surveillance via Skype, Hotmail, Outlook.com etc. MSFT was the first company to participate in PRISM.
That would be Bill Gates mother. She was buddy buddy with IBM CEO and she was the one convincing them to go with Microsoft.
Dunno if it's accurate to say Gates destroyed his life. His main problems seems self inflicted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Criminal_investigati...
And he sold out a bunch of his colleagues:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/04/17/where-k...
German Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Werdegang https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...
Some parts translated:
In the nineties, he operated Mailboxes and Partylines and was known for logging and reading all traffic to gain knowledge about current weaknesses of software. During a house search "hundreds of faked credit- and phonecards" were found.
He later cooperated and gave a lot of the info he gathered to the police. He worked closely with Günther von Grevenreuth, a very well known - but not highly regarded - attorney in german hacker circles.
Now, I appreciate that this is a rather sketchy description for a decade, but don't ask people from that time about Dotcom and expect to hear praises. He's neither well-liked, nor to be relied on or trusted.
Dotcom also wrote: "I made mistakes when I was young and I paid the price. Steve Jobs was a hacker and Martha Stuart [sic] is doing well after her insider trading case. I think over a decade after all of this happened it should NOT be the dominating topic. I am 37 years old now, I am married, I have three adorable children with two more on the way (twin girls – yeah) and I know that I am not a bad person. I have grown and I have learned."
You'll meet a lot of persons that don't give something about that excuse, as the damage is done. That statement looks like he tries to get away like school bullies do, just that he didn't bully at school, but at a later stage.
What did he do to make those words ring true? (except getting kids and saying he's wiser?)
I did noticed the pattern: people which have very little empathy have batter chance to succeed as startup founders. Which means that they will inflict harm to other people without any remorse if that make business sense. And they will be extra nice to people with more money then them.
So being mean in order to promote your business is called "being ruthless", "growth hacking", "efficient manager", etc. Being mean without any reason is just stupid and, ... really really mean.
Also there are plenty of successful founders which do have a lot of empathy and they are successful.
Decisions have to be made sometimes. I'm not defending assholes, but it's amazing how perceptions can be skewed of people and their intents, especially when it comes to the decisions they make.
For the rest of us, it's pretty obvious that successful people are mean, for the most part. Here's a simple example: politicians.
Not that parent and grandparent are not good points; the hypothesis he presents is quite unlikely given the correlation between psycopathic traits and business leaders (particularly "turn around an unsuccessful enterprise" CEOs.)[1]
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dist...
It seems pg simply left something out of his essay : successful people are not mean outward, yet bastards who fuck over everyone who deals with them, or at the very least, they were willing to abandon anyone and take away all support at the drop of a hat. (So were, to be honest, those famous scientists from hundreds of years ago. You should read more about them)
Here's another correction to be made in pg's essay :
> It seems quite likely that most successful drug lords are mean.
Not at all. They're open, approachable, they laugh and make you feel good. They will help you out at the mere asking. And then, suddenly, they'll make working for them a condition of the relationship. I mean, I've only ever met one, and didn't realize it, but still.
There's another archetype personality he seems to be describing :
> Why? I think there are several reasons. One is that being mean makes you stupid.
Here he points out that most people, in fights, lose control of their calculating nature. That's true.
> Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them.
This is not niceness as such, but merely niceness as observed by others, in casual settings (ie. not long-term).
> The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money.
This is a very important attribute.
So let's see what we know about our startup founders :
1) There is a large difference between outward appearance and inner feelings/thoughts. Outwardly, they are attractive, nice and helpful.
2) They are able to keep control, and maintain composure and execute plans in the face of high emotions.
3) As the parent poster pointed out, they will backstab others, but only to great effect. This mostly means that they are able to plan conflicts ahead of time (when you see this, it's because they cause the conflicts), others don't see them coming (probably because getting into a conflict with them is impossible unless they plan it), and they nearly always win (they don't just plan, they plan well).
4) They are driven by some sort of external impulse that is not money, nor related things like family and the like, but some sort of abstract goal ("improve the world" but applied to a specific field. So their goal is to, make the products with the best UI, or make the best business software, or ...)
It could be what he intends by the word "mean" is more along the lines of petty and emotionally immature with aspects of small-minded vindictiveness. If so, I think what he is saying is true.
That style of "meanness" (think nasty little kid) is very difficult to hide and doesn't garner respect. Aggressive ruthlessness does unfortunately, at least among the types of people that are followers.
http://48laws-of-power.blogspot.com/2011/05/law-32-play-to-p...
Self-control is certainly required to win in business. Only stupid or mentally ill people would ever be overtly "mean" in a situation where they couldn't get away with it (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Linus, etc know they can get away with it)
Take for example the quality of empathy - It consists of 2 aspects :- 1.The intellectual ability to put oneself in others shoes. 2. Too feel emotional pity/sympathy when something bad happens to them. It is shown that empathy is a key aspect lacking in psychopaths. As PG points out - empathy helps us to navigate the social world. Hence, such people have difficulty handling social situations.
Steve Wozniak who is a genuinely nice person had a strong sense of empathy and was motivated by it to help others (eg:- giving significant portion of his own shares to someone who was shortchanged during Apple's IPO)
On the other hand Steve Jobs was what you would call a "highly functioning sociopath" - Someone who had strong emotional intelligence which could be used to great success in charming and manipulating people into doing one's bidding while at the same time, having an almost pathological inability to feel any sympathy for others or remorse for one's actions.(Take the same example where he refused to help out said employee or the time when he screwed over Woz). Unless I am mistaken, this aspect of Jobs's character is hinted at in Walter Isaac's biography of Steve. I believe this rare combination of both high emotional intelligence and cold ruthlessness was one of the key factors (among many others) in Steve Job's success. I don't want to over-exaggerate things or to imply that Jobs had absolutely no empathy (As a counter-example Jobs clearly loved his adoptive parents and felt great remorse over a relatively minor incident mentioned in the book) but he does seem to be an unusually mean person (much more than Bill Gate IMO).
You may not like how the man presents himself, but that is just flat out unfair.
No he will not and cannot. No amount of good deeds to people X makes up for destroying people Y.
I agree, this is a bizarre essay.
Your bar is very high. I hope you practice what you preach.
Personally, I think Bill Gates has been a net positive for the world.
That's exactly what will make you a better person. That's how it works.
> Change "apologize to 10 people" to "save 10 African children from starvation" and I don't see how you can possibly argue this hypothetical person is "bad"
Quite easily, let me fix your badly changed argument back to what it was, equal, because your change is an intellectually dishonest attempt to make the good outweigh the bad so much that it obscures my reasoning.
If I kill someone, and then save 10 African children from starvation, you're damn right I'm still a bad person. Helping people doesn't make up for hurting other people. Morals aren't math, doing good deeds doesn't balance some scale that makes the bad deeds go away.
> Your moral philosophy makes no sense.
It clearly makes far more sense than yours.
Then guy one will counter attack: You could just enslave a minority to make the majority happy!
Then guy two will make his counter: You could have everyone respect everyone to death while everyone is miserable!
...and so it goes on and on. A nasty syndrome. A classic case of Kant vs Mill. There will be no rest tonight.
I'm not super familiar with his work, but I've heard the popular guy these days is Rawls and his theory of justice. Maybe give him a look?
I wasn't using the "save 10 children" to obscure your reasoning, I was pointing out an extreme case where your reasoning breaks down. You can reasonably call someone who punches you in the face (without good reason) a "bad person". But if you find out they've personally saved 10 children's lives I'm pretty sure you'd think they were a good person. Plus what people mean when they call someone "moral" or "immoral" usually has to do with both their actions and their predicted future actions. Again, most people are fine with calling a reformed thief "moral" under certain conditions, even if they've never personally repaid the specific people they've wronged, because they don't seem likely to be immoral in the future. If you are not willing to do this you are in the minority. Your example is dishonest because murdering someone generally indicates a lack of self control or level of sociopathy that makes future violence incredibly likely. Also murdering someone purely because you don't like them very much or you have something to gain from it is generally seen as more evil than saving a life is good. If someone murdered in cold blood and then went on to save every starving person in the world, then they are also-fucking-lutley a good person. You might want to keep a watch on them, but that seems like a pretty strong indication their murderin days are behind them, and is way more than enough to make up for it.
No you weren't, you were setting up a straw man that you could easily known down, nothing more.
> Morals sure as hell are math, just like everything else.
No they aren't.
> If someone murdered in cold blood and then went on to save every starving person in the world, then they are also-fucking-lutley a good person.
No they aren't. They're a bad person trying to make themselves feel better by making up for their crimes. They don't ever become a good person after murdering someone. That line cannot be uncrossed.
Markets appear to aggressively favour so-called winners who aren't notable for civility or decency.
Gates 2.0 is tangential to the argument, because to some extent 2.0 is the creation of Melinda and a supporting PR machine.
Gates 1.0 was a borderline sociopath who did a huge amount of damage to personal computing. At the very least MS held back OS innovation by about a decade or so, and also wasted huge amounts of time and money by forcing IE on the Internet, and also became notorious for killing promising start-ups.
And yet MS was a hugely successful company.
So PG is factually wrong. Markets, investors, and business culture don't just tolerate meanness, they actively reward it, and actively punish its opposite. (Go on - think of a corporation which is known globally from board level down for its outstanding ethics, its intolerance of exploitation, and its generosity. Now - what percentage of successful corporations has that reputation?)
So I have no idea what the point of this essay is.
FWIW I think PG's lucid prose style should be taught in schools as an excellent example of how to write persuasive essays.
But I guess most people here understand the difference between persuasive stylings and factual correctness.
I'm not seeing much of the latter here. (Unless PG means people aren't mean to him? Which is possible, I guess - founders will generally not be nasty to the dude with the money.)
But maybe we're just getting into the semantics of what it means to "make up for" or "excuse" wrongs.
Completely irrelevant to the points being made. No one is denying that.
How many more people are employed in, say, southeast Asia doing MS support work and development than were "destroyed" in Microsoft's heyday?
Also, what is "destroyed" to you?
The balance is well in favor of Mr. Gates.
EDIT:
Sure, sure, downvote away. It's my understanding that, for example, Thailand employs a large number of developers on Windows platforms and technologies.
The first is the use of the word "retarded" to mean "something I disagree with". The word itself is nearly a slur, but if that was all it was I wouldn't downvote just on that. The problem is your conflation of disagreement with stupidity. People can disagree without either one of them being stupid.
The second reason is because you're making assertions to the contrary (of the post you're replying to) without really making any reasonable argument in favor of your own position. It just adds nothing to the conversation. In fact, your own post begs a question: how many people ARE employed in SE Asia doing MS support work? What do you know about those people and their lives?
Morality isn't math, good deeds don't excuse bad deeds simply by outnumbering them. The very foundation of your thinking is flawed.
Nice usually means you are a pushover and will go out of your way to make other people happy.
I've seen lots of nice people try to start businesses..what usually ends up happening is that someone more aggressive (IE: mean) comes around and either puts them out of business or pushes their way in to take it over.
The successful ones are the ones that pushed back or were aggressive in the first place. It's not just a rule in business, it's a rule in life. If you are too nice, eventually someone will take advantage of you.
Wow. Maybe I'm just cynical, but nice, to me, means being fair, and generally employing The Golden Rule.
I've been at forks in the road many times in my business career. I always took the fork that allowed me to sleep, which meant I applied The Golden Rule. I have employees that have worked for me for 20+ years and they seem to like me.
I have no doubt that if I were a dick I could be more successful, but the cost of that would be too great for me.
On the left is a [edit: ethicial, i.e. not based on insider info, or other motivations that most people would think of as "cheating"] choice that you think will lead to more success for your business and more certainty of keeping your employees employed and maybe even hiring more. As a consequence, your competitors may lose some business and have to lay off some employees.
On the right is a choice that you think will not benefit your business, maybe this choice is just doing nothing, carrying on as before. Your competitors are unharmed, nobody is laid off, but maybe your business will not be able to hire anyone new this year.
Which choice "applies the golden rule." If this scenario isn't representative of what you are talking about, I apoligize; I am not trying to find any fault in what you are saying, just trying to clarify what you mean by what "allows you to sleep."
I had a business relationship (he was an investor in my company) with Henry Burkhardt III [1]. He was, by anyone's definition, a serial entrepreneur. Very rich. Very successful. The following example comes from watching him.
The setup: you and other shareholders control the board. Do you: 1) use your position to dramatically dilute less powerful founders and employees, or 2) be fair and keep their relative percentages commensurate with their contribution and value?
Henry famously did #2 repeatedly. I don't have the stomach for it, so I've chosen #2. If my company is acquired, it will mean quite a lot less for me (and some other people). Is that stupid? Henry would've said yes.
To give you an idea of his ethics, see [2].
And, let me be clear: the people that Henry diluted were key to his success, it's just that he didn't need them anymore. Once the invention was made or code was written, their importance could be minimized without doing harm to the business.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Burkhardt_III [2] https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr14895.txt
I've worked for many companies, large and small, and it's the same. You can be the nice person, but eventually someone will come along and use politics against you (or give you unfair work loads, etc). You also won't get nearly as many raises (because nice people generally don't ask for raises), which means less for yourself and your family.
I run a few meetup groups. I was out of the country for a few months during the summer and the co-organizer (who is very nice) ran one of the groups. More aggressive people basically took over the group and nearly ruined it.
It's human nature. When you are nice, a more aggressive person will try to control you, your actions, or your situation because they see it as a weakness. If this doesn't happen, it's by pure luck.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about being unethical. I'm just saying that fair and nice are mutually exclusive over any given amount of time. The reason is because someone will disagree with you at some point and perceive you as an "asshole" and sometimes you need to be an asshole to not get trampled over.
My experience tells me I have to disagree with you. You can be fair and firm. I've had people try and walk over me in the past. I always respond the same way: keep emotion out of it, firmly respond in a logical way to their demand. I tell them "no, you can have/do X" and explain why.
The situation where this will not work: trolls. Public figures attract trolls and dealing with them is a completely different matter. But, in a work environment, I've never had a situation that couldn't be handled in a nice but firm way.
Now I just tell people up front that I am a honest person and will keep my word to my death, but will respond to underhanded tactics with naked violence, and they can get me arrested and/or sue me iff they survive the beating (I don't much believe in weapons either, this sort of thing should be visceral and primitive).
It works surprisingly well, I suspect it's because most people who hear that think I'm kidding but have a nagging suspicion that I'm not (For the record, I am a pacifist: the last time I started a fight I was 9 years old; the last time I ended a fight was earlier this year)
I say this as someone who allowed two homeless people to move in with me and paid for their rehab, for the record - "nice" means "thinking the best of people", not "being a doormat".
Some times you have to act larger than life, good or bad, to be taken seriously.
If you reach the point where physical violence is your only resort, let me promise you that, in a business environment, punching somebody is only making your personal situation much, much worse. I have been in enough street fights as an adult to recognize that they are a spectacularly risky behavior with zero upside. And are a strong indicator of something being really off in your brain. If you're really conducting yourself in this fashion, and not just barking on the internet, people will hear about it and you will get permanently crossed off lists you didn't even know existed.
Don't beat people up, or threaten to beat people up, over business deals. Ever.
It speaks to the reptilian brain, and unfortunately, it's all some people (especially "mean people") listen to - which is my main point here.
That said, I have two close friends whose relationship I started with by being punched in the face and punching back. A punch is communication, sometimes (I would argue that a knife lunge, or a bullet, are not - they have permanent consequences).
We are humans. Humans, especially men, have an instinct for violence. If you can let it out by knuckles, and go home with just a black eye - it's a lot better than letting things fester and escalate, and up stabbed, shot, or having your life ruined by a bureaucracy.
Like I said, I'm a honest person. I've spent six months designing a critical part of a power plant on a handshake. I've had the pleasure of dealing with people who've done stuff like that on a much larger scale (think oilfields).
I just never again want to deal with people who think that they're better than their word.
As far as blacklists go... they're for other people. The space around me? Blacklist free zone. I've let two meth junkies into my home, live there for a year, put them through what rehab I could manage. One is clean and back in school, the other is mostly clean and working (min wage, but better than nothing). They had been "blacklisted" by a good chunk of society (yay being trans, eh), even by their own families. I don't do blacklists. And I don't let others do it to me. (You know the "rejection rejection letter" joke that floats around? I've done something like that once. It was fun and a bit of science got done because of it.)
How do I enforce this? With my hands and with my head, same as everyone else. They're the greatest weapons in the universe, BECAUSE they're the opposite of weapons 99% of the time, it's what you make stuff with.
Maybe I'm telling the truth and maybe I'm just being an internet tough guy. If you care to know, do science to it, think.
What do you think you're doing if not threatening to beat them up? I wouldn't tell you anything in response but I'd try and get out of a business relationship with you ASAP. It makes you sound unstable, unpredictable, not worth it.
What good would that do to the discussion, though? Read, think, make up your mind, beware echo chambers.
If you think I'm unpredictable, thank you!
If you think I'm unstable and not worth it, it's your right to. My track record should speak for itself for those who know me, and for those who don't, I'm just one more random poster on a forum.
I do have one attribute, though. I can say "no" to someone who tries to intimidate me. The worst relationships are those with a threat on the table you're not quite sure about. I'd rather call the threat in and deal with the consequences than live with a sword hanging over my neck. Life is too short for that crap.
To me, honesty remains the best policy. Even if not for me particularly, a society that believes that is more robust, and well, lead by example.
"I'm self employed now, so take the following with a grain sf salt - it worked for me though. When I was dealing with HR, I made sure to growl a lot while talking, and stand in front of the only exit. There's a kind of sociopath that will only act with some consideration if they realize that their skeletal integrity is at risk, because they're the sort of people who would do that to others if given the chance. I don't beat up people at random, but you can bet that at least some sociopaths would if they thought they could get away with it - use it against them. Not to mean that all HR folks are sociopath, but you do get quite a few."
Again I say, pump the brakes, internet tough guy. Who would do this to an HR lady? Who would need to?
You have a real boner for physical violence and intimidation-- I didn't have to dig for hours to find you saying something else crazy. Believe it or not, there exist a variety of socially acceptable outlets to get your ya-ya's out against trained opponents your own size. I think (after giving you the benefit of the doubt on not just being a bullying thug, which is how you come off) you'd enjoy it quite a lot, and get an outlet for this aggression that isn't setting you back in your career.
Seriously. Try a boxing gym. Boxing is very underrated these days. Worked wonders for me, back when I was getting in lots of fights.
Be well man. You got some demons chasing you.
If you think I have an overarching point with how to deal with sociopaths, please address it. If you don't, heh, thanks for the safety/health advice.
Who would try to appear intimidating to a HR lady? Got me. Who would try to appear intimidating to a HR guy who thought because he could get you in trouble with the boss, you had to tell him "you are right" when in fact he was wrong? Me, as often as necessary. There's right and there's wrong and it never matters who says what, if it's true it's true, if it's false it's false.
People who think might makes right, need to be reminded that the logical consequence of that thinking is "I'm bigger than you". Sometimes the reminder has to be very direct. I abhor that philosophy, but if it's the only way I have to relate to someone because they endorse it, so be it.
And no, I don't have much of a boner for anything. Like I said, I take great pride in being honest and generous. I'm just sick and tired of people acting like everyone but them is disposable, and getting away of it because they can work the system.
You know what worries me? I say "So, I spent a year of my life getting two people off meth" and nobody cares (Yeah, maybe I'm making that up to look better. Maybe I'm not. Make a decision). I say "I am not against punching the deserving in the face when warranted" and people think that's scary. What's scary is that nobody gives enough of a damn to risk bruises. I have tried to, in my small way. If more people did - we'd see more fistfights and less shootings, police abuse, civil right violations and so on, I think.
1) Try really hard not to be one. This is by far the most important point. You can't please all the people all the time, but really push yourself hard not to be toxic to the people around you. Physical intimidation and violence is extremely toxic behavior, which is the root of our discussion. Don't do it.
2) When faced with toxic people, get rid of them in the most permanent and expeditious manner possible. Rarely will open confrontation be your strategy of choice here. You escalate things and you find yourself with a beef taking up space in your brain and theirs, and, most importantly, jack shit to show for it. You get nothing but damage. That's a bad deal.
If you need a rule of thumb, it should be smile and walk away. Fast. Shitty boss? Smile and walk away. HR troll? Smile and walk away. Dead weight cofounder? Smile and walk away. Bad business deal? Smile and walk away.
Don't try to fix them, don't try to teach them a lesson, stay nice and get out. It might sting for a second, but over the long term I promise it will be to your benefit. I have done it both ways and my results have been conclusive. Don't snag yourself on the sunk cost fallacy. Get. Out.
What would have been the results if they had been nice instead? Perhaps they wouldn't have been nearly as profitable or perhaps revolutionary products never would have existed because they wouldn't have had the drive to push people to their limits to create something great.
On the other hand they could very well have done just fine and been more successful but what they do know is what worked for the people before them was working for them so there's no reason to stop doing it.
Irrelevant, if you can agree they were mean then it refutes PG's article. I agree with the parent. I also agree with part of PG's article, fights are often won by out thinking your opponent, transcending the moment to paraphrase PG. Sometimes the little guy does win, perhaps more often than we often recognize.
Because there are several first hand reports from employees about Gates' meanness ("That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard"). Woz said himself how he had to give part of his equity to the employees Jobs screwed over. The whole Uber PR debacle has been going on for months. Zuck's money fight with Saverin is well reported in his gchats. Same thing with the Snapchat guys. And so on...
Anyway, I think this is a poor article simply because it seems to depict people as being in extremes (you're either black or white), as if a "good person" won't do mean things and vice versa. There's an old saying that goes something like "the opportunity makes the thief".
There's no point in arguing though. People will continue to believe what they want to believe regardless of truth or evidence. (e.g. http://www.newsweek.com/why-we-believe-lies-even-when-we-lea...)
That's a general principle, I don't know about the particular cases you allude to.
If we are to assume that pg is in fact correct in his conclusion, then what are the examples (data points) that would bring one to this conclusion?
My view of Zuckerberg being mean comes from personal experience. Zuck was not that mean, nothing like Walter Isaacson's description of Jobs. But at the time (years ago), he was probably 90th percentile in terms of meanness of the people I have known. He could sneak in barbs and be quite disdainful to people who he viewed as less than him (in one case shouting a person down and calling them stupid).
In a previous comment, you wrote that "but it's a mistake to believe you know someone based on a collection of sensationalized stories." This is correct. But is there any evidence that the stories about Jobs or Bill Gates were sensationalized? "Sensationalized" is the operative word. If the stories are true, then the person is in fact mean, and it is a mistake to view them as not mean, simply because they are always nice around you.
In other words, people are complex, but public opinion is not.
Personally, I don't believe that it's a useful distinction to classify a person as "mean" or "nice". Actions may be mean. A person commits so many actions that how could any person possibly understand and tally up all of them?
For sure, few in history have ever deserved such a binary distinction: Everyone mortal has made mistakes in their life, carried regrets, and so on.
However that itself puts into scrutiny what the point of Paul's piece even really is -- if that piece were randomly posted by some nobody, I would honestly have assumed that it was a passive-aggressive retort to someone who they felt wronged by. But instead it's actually a genuine claim that so-called mean people don't succeed. That is absurd. Again, there is a strong, demonstrated, studied correlation between success/entrepreneurial efforts and sociopathic, and even psychopathic, tendencies. To just outright claim that no, only good people succeed, is simply outrageous.
The claim "people who are mean (by the YC partners' standards) to the YC partners or in their presence are unlikely to succeed in YC or the scene which has emerged around it" is a bit more reasonable.
It's not so much that pg has tunnel vision as it is that every founder has tunnel vision for YC's money and the smart ones structure their interactions with the moneyholders appropriately.
But I also think that most of the comments on this article are specious as well. It's silly to argue about whether Bill Gates is naughty or nice - you will never agree, and the comments you get say more about the worldviews and experiences of the people commenting than about Bill Gates.
I was once talking to a psychologist I know about corporate CEOs, and she said that there've been meta-analyses done in the psychological literature about what traits make a good leader. And what they found is that across the whole body of the field, 1000s of studies, there was zero correlation between any personality trait and leadership. What they did find, however, was that there was a strong correlation between the personality traits possessed by the study's author and the personality traits they found in the leaders they studied. In other words, everybody saw themselves in leaders. Smart people looked at famous figures and said "They're all of above-average IQ", ignoring the counterexamples that are really quite dumb. Determined people looked at leaders and said "They're all really determined", ignoring the ones that lucked into their positions. Folks who were afraid to take a leadership position projected their inadequacies onto leaders and claimed they were lucky, or sociopathic, or had other reasons why they themselves would never want the position.
Worth keeping in mind when you're reading essays on the Internet about what makes a good founder, or, for that matter, if you're an investor trying to pick out good founders to back. If you're that founder, well, the only trait that all leaders share is that they got someone to follow them.
You've spun a pretty broad claim out of a conversation you had. Yet you can find countless studies on the personality traits of leadership. This isn't just people projecting their inadequacies, but instead is educated people trying to figure out what makes the social hierarchy of our society work.
Knowing how people rise in the ranks, and how cult of personality figures gain their powers, is of obvious importance. And a pretty consistent finding is that negative personality traits -- primarily the willingness to use and discard others -- is highly advantageous in such situations.
And it's obvious certain personality traits benefit both the striving for leadership, and entrepreneurial efforts. For instance a pretty common startup thing is claiming broad innovations when there is, really, none -- when you shamelessly claim wizardry, it gets you press and mentions and from that success, even if the root of your accomplishment is absolutely banal. Most of us have an internal voice that says "eh...sure most people will fall for it, but other people might look down on us" and will add disclaimers on our claims. No one wants to talk about that.
For that to be true, you need to point to a study that shows that the founders of highly successful tech startups - including the ones YC has funded like Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe - tend to be sociopaths.
In fact, probably the only people in the world who have the hard data to find such a correlation are the psrtners of YC; the success of their organisation relies on it. Aside from being incorrect, it would be counter to the commercial interests of YC to write this essay if it were false.
To my knowledge, the research you're referring to is based on large bureaucratic corporations like banks, in which it pays better to be a shrewd political operative than a skilled practitioner of a craft and a hard-nosed-but-ultimately-well-intentioned innovator and leader.
But as this and many other PG writings explain, modern startup culture, at its best, embodies a transition away from that kind of corporate culture.
With that in mind, even if it were true that people like Gates and Jobs did mean things 20-30 years ago, it doesn't mean it's the optimal way to be in the startup world of today and the foreseeable future.
I have no stake in this argument, but this tactic is kind of weak. "I would argue with you, but you suffer from a cognitive bias that makes you irrational (which, by the way, I do not)."
That might even be true, but you can't accuse someone of being irrational before they've actually done it.
Someone could just as easily accuse you of being blind to the evidence that goes against your own anecdotes and personal experiences. In other words, your personal experiences of these people could be positive but not represent other parts of their character that you haven't seen.
(For what it's worth, I think that a "mean people" / "good people" dichotomy is far too reductive to actually have any meaningful conversation about).
If it makes you feel any better, I'm mostly criticizing myself for engaging in a pointless and unwinnable debate :)
Personally I think in any situation where a company strategically outmaneuvers another company it is going to come off somewhat as mean (e.g. Microsoft in the 90s protecting their turf). The idea that a company/person succeeds because they are mean, however, is far too simplistic.
"Sue didn't work as hard as me"
"Bobby isn't the idea man"
"I don't owe Claire anything, she took 2 days off sick last year"
"Carl's only a contractor, I can pay him 2 months late"
"Jay only contributed a tiny amount at the beginning, now he does nothing, it's time to cut him loose"
"Sally just isn't a cultural fit any more"
Or simply "I worked so much harder/am brighter/deserve it more than most people, I'm allowed to be a bit selfish".
It's the same thing as power being corrupting.
And as I've said in my edit, why does he use "good" and "benevolent" as antonyms instead of "polite" or "diplomatic"? Why "x-ray vision for character"? "they're usually trying to improve the world"? "you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things"? "People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen."?
pg was clearly not talking about name throwing or spite. He's talking about moral character. He is repeatedly making positive judgements about how great these founders are. Not how they don't belittle other people for kicks.
Note: edited to remove identifying information.
I've edited my comment to remove identifying information because I don't feel like getting into more detail, and I agree that anonymous character attacks on the Internet are not that helpful.
Actually, telling it might be fine. Believing it, not so much.
I know how fashionable it is to hate on <company>, but is this what it's come to? An unsubstantiated story about how someone felt "vibes"? When the CEO didn't actually do anything?
Judge a person not by how they treat their superiors (Jessica, Paul) but how they treat those weaker than them, or those who can't do anything for them.
You are happy to take Paul's intuitions as data, but the intuitions of real people NOT in a position of power, who interacted with this guy in a place where he will show his true colors, you will dismiss.
This describes 96% of my interactions with all people, everywhere. It's nice that there is the other 4%, but they're not important in daily life.
If that surprises you, you may still be a young person who hasn't learned to see past the routine, reflexive veneer of niceness the 96% erect. Or I may be tragically cynical. But either way, once you adjust your expectations accordingly, disappointment and shock become less of a useless distraction.
On the other hand, a personal first hand account on how BG was a super nice guy would be a lot less relevant in my opinion.
You're right though that it comes down to definitions. I think the prevailing definition here is some closer to villain.
If you've never been on the other side of the news, you may not understand the difference.
You have a double standard: You certainly won't be coming to the defense of alleged misogynists and sexual harassment, for example, with cries of "but you don't really know the person" and talk of "fictionalized characterizations".
At the same time, I know it's pointless to argue with people who already know the answer, so I'm probably wasting my time.
Because it is widely perceived as socially indefensible and because of YC's support for women in particular.
Perhaps it is an unfair to apply these generalizations to you, however I seriously doubt you (or any public figure) would depart from them.
Nonetheless, the point was more general: Obviously you form opinions of people without knowing them personally.
> In this particular case I commented because I have direct experience with some of the people being discussed and am familiar with the ways in which the popular group-think diverges from reality for this group.
I pointed out that your experience may not be informative because of the particular power relations of your interactions. I think that is a fair observation.
This group is ill-informed, has poor reasoning skills and poor judgement. That doesn't have any bearing on the question of whether successful people are more likely to be sociopaths.
> I know it's pointless to argue with people who already know the answer
You could apply the statement equally well to yourself.
My purpose in all of this is not to "prove" that these are all nice people, but simply to point that you are all speaking with great confidence about the characters of people that you really know nothing about.
It's not right when people unjustifiably get socially lynched by the mob and it happens often. However, many successful people really are sociopaths --- which might be expected from a person who puts success before anything else --- and I don't think anyone ought to give up forming opinions on anyone else just because the mob often gets it wrong or because we don't know every detail of the lives of the accused. If that weren't the case then we couldn't pass judgement on many of the people we "obviously" want to (despots, etc).
(And disagreement, in particular defending tech executives, is not socially indefensible, defending sexism is).
You will be astonished at how different the two can be.
Nobody here is saying the YC and VC community are all evil super-villians. But as PG's essay and your views here indicate, there may be a startlingly shallow understanding of the nuances of human behavior in the YC community as a whole.
Techies such as ourselves tend to be very optimistic and trusting people. We always give our friends the benefit of the doubt when we can. But you and PG are seemingly taking this way, way too far in spite of mountains of contrary evidence (and I'm talking evolutionary biology, not just anecdotal).
Humans are primates who form status hierarchies and ruthlessly enforce them via any means necessary. This includes power asymmetry, extortion, bribery, status signaling, and a whole host of others nasty behaviors (watch Game of Thrones for the full gamut). That PG and yourself apparently deny this basic biological fact for a certain group (i.e. YC founders) does not make it less true.
I have to disclaim here that I'm a huge fan of yours Paul, and I know much about the incredible struggles you've faced in life. I know the only way to move forward is to be relentlessly positive, and this is also my own personal philosophy. However, part of being a rational person is trying to see the empirical world for what it is, not what we want it to be. I think this is the only thing PG is guilty of; He wants founders to be above average in altruism, when the reality may be the opposite.
All the best, and forever a fan.
If Uber, as a company, strikes you as "not mean", you're delusional.
One of the big arguments for Uber being mean, is that they recruited drivers from competitors. The goal there was to help extend an economic opportunity (the alleged benefit of capitalism) to more private contractors. We complain when large tech companies collude to keep salaries down, and I embrace companies who work to counter that. The fact that Uber appears to be doing that for tens of thousands of people every week puts them in the "not mean" category for me.
It's very possible that we have different criteria for what is mean or not mean. I'm basing mine on the facts I have, rather than sensationalist reports from blogs masquerading as real journalism (the fact that obvious hit piece have been written about Uber doesn't put them in the "mean" category for me, although it makes me wonder about their competitors who would do that). I haven't seen Uber playing dirty in the press, with their riders or with their drivers. They seem to genuinely be making the world a better place, with a focus on helping both sides of their marketplace. That said, I'm open to other points of view. Am I missing something?
We've managed to set up our civilization such that improving the world is usually the best way to gain power and wealth. While the ancients may have gone in for conquest and pillage, now the best way to make it big is to figure out how to give people what they want in a way that nobody else has done before. But that doesn't mean that the people working within this arrangement are good people.
My only hope is that uber doesn't take down too many innocent bystanders as it steamrolls taxi industries across the world.
Unfortunately it's not in uber's, as a business, best interest to give two fucks about innocent bystanders (I think, -we'll see how the "nicer" new taxi company replacements do over the next decade).
There are hundreds of reports from colleagues, family, friends about the characters of each of these people. They are completely different.
There is video evidence confirming these judgement. There is video evidence of Woz going around being a pretty sweet guy. There is video evidence of Jobs berating people and being mean.
Should we--the unconnected public--pretend that we can't know anything about these people just because we haven't met them?
It's not true that you have to know someone personally to judge their character.
We, the masses, don't judge people by how they treat their friends, superiors, or other rich, connected, powerful people (like you).
We judge them by how they treat the little people.
Being mean is like being trustworthy. Sometimes it only takes one sufficiently mean act to become a mean person--especially if that mean act is toward a little person who can't do anything to fight back.
You're a modern aristocrat, Paul, whether you like it or not. Not every aristocrat is abusive but one trend throughout history is that the kind aristocrats usually protect the evil ones. The servants know the difference. The nice aristocrats are ignorant. The mean artistocrats pull the wool over the eyes of the nice ones. If the servants complain about the mean ones, the nice ones side with the mean ones. Class solidarity, willful ignorance, or both?
I am very sure this is what is happening in Paul Graham's case, and likely yours too. You are apologizing for the cruel aristocrats because they don't show you their true colors.
To me being mean is to inflict harm on others without any personal gain, just for the sake of harming.
That said most of your examples were indeed harmful but also had a clear personal or corporate goal, which in my eyes makes them not-mean (I'm not talking about ones you didn't give any example, since it's hard to discuss them).
Yes, Steve Jobs was very mean sometimes. But he also knew how to praise, he also knew how to identify and motivate talent.
And of course, it's one thing to be a startup founder, another one to begin seeing money in the bank. That changes things usually.
"Studies conducted by forensic psychologist Robert Hare indicate that about 1 percent of the general population can be categorized as psychopathic, but the prevalence rate in the financial services industry is 10 percent.
These "financial psychopaths" generally lack empathy and interest in what other people feel or think. At the same time, they display an abundance of charm, charisma, intelligence, credentials, an unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation, and a drive for thrill seeking.
A financial psychopath can present as a perfect well-rounded job candidate, CEO, manager, co-worker, and team member because their destructive characteristics are practically invisible."
2. Counsellors identify psychopaths based on a pattern of actions that lack empathy. A psychopath might be very "nice" when he meets you, but as soon as he can benefit by throwing you under the bus, he does so with no display of remorse. The lack of empathy is the defining characteristic of the psychopath--a non-psychopath will refrain from throwing someone under the bus because they empathize with that person. Steve Jobs fucked over his colleagues without remorse. Woz then gave them all money because Woz felt bad--Woz showed that he has empathy. Jobs showed he does not. This is why psychologists consider Jobs an obvious case of a psychopath.
3. Vulnerable people discover psychopaths due to the classic psychopath turn. When at a moment's notice the person you thought was so nice to you turns on you and you realize they were just using you. When they "turn" they go back on promises, they throw you under the bus, backstab you, generally fuck you over. Usually they do this by getting you to trust them first because they seemed so nice that you trusted them. This happens ALL THE TIME in the tech industry and if pg isn't aware of these cases he is willfully ignorant.
But, meeting someone for the first time, all you see is a charming smile, a warm handshake, and a nice, brilliantly intelligent person.
It should also be noted that many sociopaths also just end up in prison, because they're impulsive, don't care about others, and manipulate people, which can end very badly in most cases. It's not like sociopathy is a superpower; on the contrary it is a massive deficit. Most CEOs are not sociopaths, but the fact that the ratios are so screwed up is illuminating, because it tells us about our society more than anything else: we have optimized empathy, and the optimal amount is zero.
So pg is just factually wrong.
Pg seems to have some kind of fantasy that Jessica is a gifted psychologist. The truth is that she probably is when compared to other autism-spectrum programmers, but not when compared to professional cousellors or other people whose job it is to understand and empathize.
What Jessica considers niceness--"niceness for the purpose of making money"--is not going to be the same as what most people consider niceness.
The programming world scores high on the autism spectrum and on the psychopath spectrum. Compared to the rest of the world, programmers seem like very mean, cold, ruthless people.
PG is sharing observations based on seeing hundreds of founders succeed or fail.
You are wrong.
Disagreeable individuals place self-interest above getting along with others. They are generally unconcerned with others' well-being, and therefore are unlikely to extend themselves for other people. Sometimes their skepticism about others' motives causes them to be suspicious, unfriendly, and uncooperative. People very low on agreeableness have a tendency to be manipulative in their social relationships. They are more likely to compete than to cooperate.
Do you have any actual knowledge of the Big Five psychometric scales, or are you just saying that because you want it to be true?
Disagreeableness is a scientifically validated and incontrovertible synonym for meanness.
Agreeableness is a personality trait manifesting itself in individual behavioral characteristics that are perceived as kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm and considerate. In contemporary personality psychology, agreeableness is one of the five major dimensions of personality structure, reflecting individual differences in cooperation and social harmony. People who score high on this dimension tend to believe that most people are honest, decent, and trustworthy.
Agreeableness is a synonym for niceness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Agr...
The agreeableness trait reflects individual differences in general concern for social harmony. Agreeable individuals value getting along with others.
This is absolutely not the opposite of meanness. If Wikipedia is incorrect, please edit it. Note that unlike a YC comment, a Wikipedia edit will require a real citation.
Or just go read a book, textbook, or journal article on the big 5 system.
Source: I'm a grad student in psychology. Specializing in empirically keyed personality psychometrics (i.e. psychology centered on data analytics. I also have a BS in CS. I'm basically a "data scientist" / statistician)
Take your counter example pg. He is the business of excluding people which is actually pretty mean when you consider the damage path. The operating mechanics behind this very forum, designed intentionally by pg, are considerably mean, but of course all of this will depend on who you are and where you sit relative to any action taken by any given person.
> For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands...
History is littered with examples how gaining control was simply a matter of: ownership, negotiating, venturing through difficult terrain or access points, or even plain old racing to be the first person there and establishing a stronghold.
The word 'stronghold' is interesting. It implies force, yet often does not require any. Where one person might use the world 'stronghold' another might use 'establishment'. HN is an establishment. It maintains its strong hold on high quality content from its users via mean practices like hell banning over trivial things like not agreeing with it's owners or because of some relative interpretation of meanness held solely by its owners.
I'm not persuaded that Microsoft substantially held back the internet. IE of a decade ago was not a great browser by today's standards, but the hardware of the time could not have really supported the javascript-heavy apps that we take for granted today. I occasionally use gmail and google maps on a G4 powerbook with a "modern" browser (TenFourFox), and it's pretty painful. It almost feels like being back on a 48K dial-up ISP service. And let's not forget that Microsoft invented (or at least had the first browser support for) the scriptable XMLHttpRequest, the foundation for almost all of the asynchronous web apps that we use today. In fact way back in IE 5 (with the MSXML ActiveX plugin) you could build rich, responsive interfaces and asynchronous interaction using XML, XSLT, and scripting YEARS before you could do it in any other browser.
http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
In particular:
http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm#v
There was more than just what the court found, however.
You're absolutely right. Think of all the billions of dollars that Gates donated to AIDS research, cancer research, vaccinations, etc. But no matter how many lives he saves, he'll never be able to make up the fact that he held back the internet for 6 or 7 years.
[0] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
I'm confused by your comment. Sure Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle are older established companies but from everything I know about Apple and Microsoft their stories seem very much to fit the startup mold (don't know much about Oracle). And the other three Zynga, Facebook, and Uber are comparatively much more recent successes that definitely took the standard seed funding to VC route and embody everything you would think of as a modern startup.
So you're saying that this doesn't apply to super successful startups? Honestly that's not been my experience, both personally and from plenty of stories I've heard from the more "modest" startups that have been successful but not on the same grandiose scale these companies have been.
In PG's view startups succeed because they actually create some real value, something that other people want. And to build something like this it helps to be nice.
Maybe I'm naive, but it's hard to say that PG doesn't know what he is talking about when he talks about startups :).
Of course this is a weird post. I think he wanted focus on the aspects of flattery involved in praising technology. You are providing counter-examples to a theory where his evidence is "my friends aren't assholes", which, while surely true, has a potential confound he doesn't discuss, and "people YC likes do better than those that we don't like", which isn't surprising for a SV power nexus.
I would be very interested if you could elaborate on the specifics of "the billions of damage he caused humanity" and "held the internet back for 6 or 7 years", these seem like rather extraordinary claims.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716596
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.
As for the others, they're more open because they see it as a competitive advantage. That's something Microsoft didn't have to think about, since they owned 95% of the market and nobody would figure out how to break in for over a decade.
I wouldn't say that bundling IE was bad. What was bad was so thoroughly crushing all of the competition that "Windows" and "PC OS" became all but synonymous, and then that lack of competition causing terrible stagnation and the terror-filled reign of IE6.
That is not true, otherwise, what do you have to say regarding Chrome for iOS [0]?
[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrome-web-browser-by-google...
They drove the competitor (Netscape) out of business by giving away their browser. There's no way for the market to correct for that or "a feasible competitor to emerge".
It amazes me that someone who's only 5 years younger than me and even has a CS degree is so completely out of touch with recent computer history. I understand why, everything changes so fast, but you cannot understand what MS did if you weren't there. Their callous destruction of Netscape stopped an era of rapid innovation in internet technologies, HTML & js simply stagnated for almost 6-7 years afterwards, before it had been iterating rapidly.
It is now back to iterating like it did, these last 2-3 years and the WHATWG, it really feels like things are back on track again, though some really, really important things are still taking a while (like observables, which are super important for GUI driven apps).
It's an imponderable, we'll never know the answer. You are extrapolating it out to a scenario where IE didn't exist, and Netscape, the standards organizations, and all the other key players were harmonious stewards of some sort of golden age.
I'm not saying that I support anything that Microsoft did in the '90s, rather that it is totally plausible to me that the players in the no-IE parallel universe were perfectly capable of screwing things up just as badly or worse. Since it's extrapolation, what's plausible to us says more about how we feel about the different players than anything else.
The problem was the combination of IE6 (at the time, the best browser out there) and MS business tactics simply crushed everyone else. At that point MS decided to work on other things and let IE waste.
They did a lot of other strange things as well. I know Microsoft people showed up to at least one IETF working group pretending to be interested in doing standards work, only to return later having patented key points of the standard, saying they weren't interested anymore.
So IE was just a small part of that famous strategy, even if it was a central piece. But the bundling was never much of an issue unless you were a direct competitor. The only reason that's what people remember is the court case was widely reported in media at the time.
It always saddens me to think of how many people want to see this principle enshrined in law.
But if anyone killed Netscape by giving away free software it was the Apache project since for a while selling web server software was a viable business, while OTOH there's really no historical data to support the fact that selling web browser licenses was ever going to be an economically successful strategy outside of niche markets like Opera.
And whether or not Microsoft directly killed Netscape or not, I'd argue that the web would not be nearly the ubiquitous technology it is today if web browser software typically cost money, which means that by standardizing web browser software as free Microsoft did the entire web industry (if not netscape) a great service, really.
It wasn't until IE4's years-long stagnation that IE had what I would consider a negative impact on "keeping the internet back" and Netscape's spectacular pre-Firefox implosion had just as much to do with that as Microsoft's IE bundling did, since there was a good stretch with no really viable alternative browser that didn't suck even worse than IE.
And on the topic of Netscape's implosion, I'd argue that while Microsoft's business practices didn't do Netscape any favors, Netscape's complete failure as a company was 50% on Netscape itself executing poorly, 49% on apache totally killing the idea of "paid web server software market" and maybe 1% Microsoft's business practices... at best).
Also to be fair you also have to factor in the many ways in which Microsoft pushed the "internet" (and by that I am speaking mostly of the web) forward. One example: XMLHttpRequest ("Ajax"), prior to which the web was a very static "electronic pamphlet"-y place.
I'd also argue that not bundling IE with Windows would have held the internet (in terms of people being connected) back a lot more than bundling it did. At the very least IE is (still) the best, easiest way to download and install Chrome on a new Windows install.
I personally used the Zortech tools in my C/C++ days, played Empire a ton, even written a few hobby clones of Empire.
In fact you might call yourself lucky for not going into business with MS, or you would end up like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#T...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#T...
The same kind of thing happened 15 years later with UEFI and Secure Boot.
Not being mean here.
That's 7 years less of internet and technological perspective he gets to experience in his mortal life, if that's actually the case.
It depends on what you think is more valuable. Are you working in tech for tech? Or are you working in tech to make money? Just because these people made a lot of money, doesn't make them totally knowledgeable about all tech.
I think as long as you give ideas openly, you get ideas back. You teach people about tech, you learn about tech back. People who get greedy are fucking themselves in one way or another. With all that fame, independence, and achievement comes a lot of opportunity to miss developing a sense of humility, social connection, and interpersonal growth.
But, I think there is a cautious difference we must make here. There is a difference between meanness, and the attempt to make fair judgments - diplomacy. The position of a person who has to decide the fate of their company and the effects that has cascading down human generations on technology and human growth in general, is not in an easy position to be in. If these were simple problems, we would see simple answers.
It is easy to look back at people's decisions in retrospect and criticize. It's hard to make those decisions when you are actually there. It's hard to empathize with people that seem like assholes, but I wonder if they have difficult empathizing with themselves. We get to see a sliver of who these people are, and that sliver is distorted through a chorus of echoes across culture.
Which is to say, they're lottery ticket winners. And that's super, but it is a bad idea to model your personal finances on lottery ticket winners.
In the rest of the stupid world, with people who are just grinding it out day by day and not jousting with billionaires, being nice is a very, very, very good idea. Being nice keeps doors open. Being nice to everybody you can keeps a lot of doors open. You never know when your next deal, or next gig, or next hire is going to come from. I can't tell you how many times I have gotten a great opportunity (often years after the fact, or through a friend of a friend of a friend) through helping people out just to be nice.
You can't dictate luck, but you can absolutely put yourself in a position to be lucky. And the more times you can spin the wheel, the better off you are. Having people in your corner is a powerful influencer of this.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to finish a very profitable contract job that I got because I liked to hang out and drink beers with the drummer who lived next door a couple years back. (Who subsequently went on to become the head of marketing for a national firm. When hippies sell out, they go all the way.)
jobs, ellison, gates and as it's currently looking to be, zuckerberg. sustained success, even after massive setbacks. you don't build billion dollar companies (as in revenue, not fantasy valuations) on pure luck.
you build them on being a mean motherfucker. practically all of history is evidence against PG here. edison. ford. rockefeller. etc etc etc.
Everyone focuses on the last statement but misses the premise, which is a recurring theme in Graham's essays.
human beings that strive for greatness are ruthless, that necessary focus and willpower come with a price. it can be seen everywhere - politics, the military, arts, sports,...
Put plainly:
You're not a billionaire. Acting like one is a poor strategy. We plebians are well served by being nice if we want to move up the bracket.
By all means, when you are rich and powerful, act like kind of a prick. You might need to act like a prick. I honestly couldn't say, but you could make a very plausible case for not being sunshine and rainbows all day, saying 'no' a lot, and pushing people pretty hard. (Lying, cheating, and stealing is another matter-- these are principally the actions of desperate people. Being a tough businessperson doesn't make you a jerk, though.)
But do yourself (and the rest of us) a favor and don't go there until you have to.
"It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean."
There's probably a disconnect between the most successful people pg knows personally, and the handful of tech CEO's you know only from reputation. I'm willing to bet not even pg knows (or knew) Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison personally. Who does he know?
"I only know people who work in certain fields: startup founders, programmers, professors."
There are hundreds of successful startup founders, and you can name seven mean ones over the course of almost 50 years. I'm sure if we worked together we could come up with a few more, but it's a small, countable number. Y Combinator probably funds around seven successful startups every year, and that's not even counting the programmers and professors. I'm willing to bet PG's experience outstrips anything that you or I know purely from reputation.
Plus, I think some of your examples actually support pg's argument. Take Uber, for instance. The technical implementation of Uber is trivial. What enables Uber to survive is their ability to pick and win political fights with the taxi cartels, which is exactly the kind of place where pg would expect mean people to succeed. Oracle and Microsoft won, not based on technical merit but based on enterprise sales and deal-making.
I would never call these people nice, but I'd say they were nice to me. Often how nice someone is depends on where you're standing and how they see you.
If someone is nice to people when it's advantageous to them, all that means is that they're not an idiot. You can learn a lot about someone's character by how they treat people they don't have to be nice to.
Just talking to people at a party or a business dinner is not enough to get any semblance of character judgment aside from some pretty stylistic ones (small cues that say more about preferences than worldview, for example). Even playing golf together can hide monstrous raging alcoholics and serial killers from us all because these people have developed almost split personalities after decades of manipulating people. It's not necessarily conscious either but almost a personality trait like being really energetic, quiet, paying attention to detail obsessively, etc. I say all this as the son of someone that's got the cult leader personality type and how he works has framed how I absolutely refuse to work. Some might argue I'm doing better but I don't think so in terms of the original article context at all.
It should also be noted that pg's sample is somewhat biased against Fortune 500 companies and dysfunctional yet still-in-business organizations that employee so many but repel those like pg and perhaps those he knows as well. Furthermore, the kind off folks that are attracted to in dysfunctional orgs are similar to men that prey upon insecure women. There's similar equivalents for business folks too.
So, in short I think pg has been blessed to still have this optimistic view of any flavor of meritocracy. It's nice to be able to turn away from companies where failure is constant, rampant, and extensively rewarded to these kinds of people that don't do well as leaders in start-ups and even finance. I used to hold his view but after my career I regard it as an idealistic notion.
This is what kills the whole idea the article is based on for me. Given his position in the "startup world" pg is like an extremely physically attractive female who thinks all the men around her are super nice. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but either way their interactions with you (and those closest to you) are probably not an accurate measure of that.
What defines whether someone is mean or not to me is how they treat people who they don't want anything from, which (soft retirement aside) is a position pg will never be in with regards to startup founders.
"My wife and Y Combinator cofounder Jessica is one of those rare people who have x-ray vision for character. Being married to her is like standing next to an airport baggage scanner. She came to the startup world from investment banking, she has always been struck both by how consistently successful startup founders turn out to be good people, and how consistently bad people fail as startup founders."
So he's not judging the character of these founders based upon how nice they are to him, but based on Jessica's purported "x-ray vision" for character, which presumably can't be easily fooled by the usual deference seen in the founder/investor relationship. I don't know. But I think the evidence he has access to is a lot greater in extent than the evidence you or I have access to.
And I'm sure he has access to vast more amounts of evidence about founders than I do, but that doesn't mean he knows how to correctly analyze the evidence or won't look at the evidence with partisan eyes. This country is still filled with climate change deniers, even ones that are intelligent in most other parts of their lives.
Just look at history to see how wrong PG is about mean people failing. Zuckerberg by many accounts did not treat his partners fairly, that was mean of him. Gates tried to screw over Paul Allen numerous times, not a nice guy. Steve Jobs denied the paternity of his first born (one example of many negative Jobs' stories), what a lovely fella. Both Uber and Snapchat are prime examples of companies being led by less than noble morality and Github epitomized how to do it right, until they were an example of sexual harassment. Is any of this enough for PG to categorize these founders as mean? If not, how many acts of meanness make someone mean (and vice versa, how many acts of kindness makes someone kind)?
Paul Graham is a very intelligent man and by all rights, seemed to have earned his success and reputation. But if PG was always right, especially since he has all this evidence about SV and startups, there wouldn't be any failed YC companies, they'd all be IPOs and massive exits. PG is not infallible.
PG does make some good points, I really like the last paragraph.
"So I'm really glad I stopped to think about this. Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean. We tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not meanness. And now I have both an additional reason to crack down on it, and an additional argument to use when I do: that being mean makes you fail."
I've seen a lot of mean people succeed, but that is a great lesson to teach, even if it is a bit faulty. Maybe if we all teach our children this, one day it would actually become true.
And if you're going to come into the thread and question that based on a handful of examples of people you've never met personally but have only heard about through the media, whose side am I supposed to take, exactly? As little basis as pg might have to make general statements about the character of most startup founders (and programmers, and professors), you have even less, because you're just going off what you hear in the media, and "<<founder of massively successful startup>> is a nice guy" is not a story that gets many clicks.
Are most successful startup founders nice people? Are mean people less likely to be successful in startups? Maybe. Paul Graham says so, you say no, and from where I'm sitting Paul Graham has the more educated opinion. But from the perspective of someone reading the essay, I'm willing to say: I don't have any evidence to disagree with you, and it's kind of interesting to see where you go exploring why that might be the case whether than making a futile attempt to prove a point that almost nobody has the evidence to argue for or against either way. Which isn't to say I believe your premise on blind faith, but I'm willing to accept it for the sake of argument and let you get to your real point.
Do you refute any of the reported stories? Do you believe Paul Allen was lying when he said Bill Gates tried to screw him? Do you think all the negative stories about Jobs was just sour grapes over his success? Do you believe there was no sexual harassment at Github? Or that the actions of Uber's executives to this point have all been with the purpose to spread love across humanity? If you can't refute any of the stories other than by saying the media is biased or negative news gets more clicks, then you have your proof that Paul Graham is wrong.
Your only argument is that PG knows better than I do without actually refuting my argument that PG only sees what his position allows him to see, the founders being nice to him and around him. Instead of taking PGs argument at face value and just saying I'm wrong, why don't you try to prove his argument correct, or prove my examples are either wrong or outliers.
And my point has always been Paul Graham is meeting these people as peers (and so is his wife). These people are going to be nice to him and around him, giving him a false sense of the founders true character. But over time a person's true character will reveal itself or be revealed by stories of those who worked with them. I believe we have enough stories to posit PG is wrong.
> Do you personally know Paul Graham or are you basing your belief in him on stories in the media and in his writing? If you haven't met him, how is that any different than me believing in these media reports?
I don't "believe in him". I give him higher credence than I give you because he personally knows hundreds of startup founders and you don't. Carefully reread the end of my last comment if you're unsure where I stand on this. I don't have a strong opinion either way and, aside from the natural human compulsion to have a strong opinion on everything regardless of the evidence at hand or lack thereof, there's no reason for you to have a strong opinion either.
> Do you refute any of the reported stories?
I don't think they provide enough information for me to make a blanket judgment about another person's character, and even if so, you've mentioned like four founders, which is nowhere near a large enough sample to refute pg. Plus, half of your examples kind of balance each other out: there are lots of stories about Woz being a nice person, and Paul Allen seems to have lacked the barracuda instincts of Gates by all accounts, so if you're going to take the media reports at face value you already have half as many nice founders as mean ones.
1. What defines a mean person? How many negative actions does it take before we can decide someone is mean. And how large do the actions need to be. A lot of this depends on how well we know the subject. If a friend acts mean on several occasions I might ignore it or prescribe it to a bad day. If I read about the founder of Uber doing the same thing, maybe I feel the guy is a dick. Of course the more reports and the more we either have to ignore the signs or admit our friend maybe the dick.
2. How many mean founders need to succeed for PG to be wrong? Is one enough or is that an outlier? 10%, 25%, 50% or more?
I've listed some of the most successful examples, from several decades. If all these founders are mean, then I'd say that goes a long way to proving PG wrong. And just because these founders had partners that were nice doesn't prove PG correct because it was the mean partner that had the greater success (Jobs v Woz, Gates vs Allen). If the stories out of Github and Uber are true then again we have two recent success stories that show a mean disposition isn't the roadblock to success that PG believes it is.
My belief is essentially that start-up founders aren't any different than any other entrepreneur at least in disposition. There will be both mean and nice success stories. I've yet to see anything to refute this, and that includes PG's essay with all his "evidence", his wife's "sixth sense" and your posts.
So what's the rational thing for me to do as a reader? What I did was to say, "I wouldn't know, but I'm curious to see where you're going with this", and it turned out he went somewhere interesting with it. Whereas you just shut your brain down because you could think of a half dozen sensationalized examples of people you've never met and missed out on getting to read an interesting essay (that incidentally also explains why, to name two examples, Bill Gates and the Uber founder are exceptions to pg's rule).
I found his article failed the simple smell test, if it smells like bullshit, it probably is. I've read the article over and over and each time it smacks of a noble in his guarded castle talking about how wonderful and safe life is under the new king and how the generosity of the new king knows no bounds, all the while his royal cousins are massacring the proletariat.
But please, go ahead and bury your head in the sand.
This is an important point.
Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Travis K. are each notorious. We love stories about these guys because they're entertaining and sometimes shocking (I admit, I certainly do, anyway).
You don't read much about Drew Houston or Chesky, except when Dropbox partners with Microsoft or Airbnb elaborately rolls out a new logo. But when Steve Jobs would reply to one customer's email, in his customarily curt fashion, there was always a press field day.
It's possible that "nice" CEOs are less interesting to talk about but no less effective.
My full comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674961
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcS04BI2sbk
Particularly the example of Buurtzorg, a Dutch healthcare provider, is quite convincing: They went from 0% to 80% market-share by basically being less mean to their employees and clients.
(This Ask-HN discussion is also related to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8662376)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8673726