Yeah, I think one of the dirty secrets that doesn't really come across until you've been in the entrepreneurial trenches for a while is that most people who mak

Yeah, I think one of the dirty secrets that doesn't really come across until you've been in the entrepreneurial trenches for a while is that most people who make a lot of money end up doing so not by being paragons of morality, but by skirting rules and doing things other people may find questionable or unfair. YC itself acknowledges this to an extent by saying that good founders are moral, but that they are not "goody-two-shoes" and they break rules "that don't matter". Of course, the material value of each rule is in the eye of the beholder; surely the cab drivers of the world felt that there was material value to adhering to their regulations and that it would not be moral or necessarily safe to circumvent those regulations. Then Uber came along and its founders entered the pantheon of those that break "rules that don't matter". Ditto for Airbnb. Most types of marketing and PR are morally dubious. But you have to play that game if you're going to get anywhere. That's the secret that entrepreneurs have to learn, the secret that doesn't get shown in the profile pieces or the television specials. "Might makes right" in this world and if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to loosen from a theoretical moral ideal to a practical one that is informed by the competitive landscape of capitalism. You can nitpick and find fault with most money-making techniques, so you just have to try to do something you can be reasonably comfortable with, acknowledging that in a competitive landscape, sometimes uncomfortable choices have to be made. If you do find something that makes money and has no competitors, thus allowing you to not worry about underhanded techniques to steal your marketshare, take advantage of your early position to decisively corner the market. That means employing the same techniques that would be employed against you, because those techniques will be employed against you pretty soon. I know this because one of my companies was roundly beaten after a spammer started a competitor and engaged SEO link rings to inorganically alter his ranking, among other tactics that I was morally "above" until my company was pwned that way. Now I understand you must play that game, that everyone plays that game, and they just don't talk about it because it doesn't help them to do so. It helps them to keep potential competitors naive. Playing by the rules may be the cool way to do it, but in the real world, it doesn't work, because there is someone who is willing to break those rules. How many entrepreneurs started on something like Uber but quit because they saw the regulatory landscape and a) didn't have the millions to fight cities and the cab industry; b) didn't want to run afoul of city regulations in the first place? Do what YC does: break whatever rules are in your way and then afterwards say they were rules that "didn't matter". If you say this from a position of success, people will believe you.