4 ms·
I'm usually a huge fan of pg, but in his essay about founders, there was one section which I wasn't very comfortable with: http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.ht
by Fede_V 10y ago
I'm usually a huge fan of pg, but in his essay about founders, there was one section which I wasn't very comfortable with: http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
Specifically, when he talks about naughtiness, he says:
Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter.
I have absolutely no interest in trying to play language games - and maybe I'm misunderstanding what pg is saying, but it has always seemed to me that the judgement of whether the rule that was broken was consequential or not is post-hoc. For example: had airbnb gotten in serious trouble and floundered in the aftermath of when they started scraping craigslist for listings, they wouldn't be clever and naughty, but reckless and foolish. Had zenefits managed to grow even more or hire some key lobbyists and get the law changed in time, their CEO would be hailed as a visionary genius that cut through pointless red tape.
Anyway: the reason I brought that up is that a lot of the ethically dubious things that Elizabeth Homes did are very similar to things which a lot of tech companies did at one time or another. Trying to push ambitious young men and women to look at rules and regulations as something they should take pride in hacking and bypassing is a dangerous game - even more so in fields that are highly regulated.
Addendum: part of the original hacker ethic was to ignore stupid rules. For example, we take delight in Feynmann cracking safes at Los Alamos, or finding some clever hack to bypass a pointless procedure. However: I think it's one thing to hack a system to make a point about how stupid it is, but it's completely different if you add a monetary incentive, and suddenly the rules that get broken are those that stand in the way of you making money. The two sets have a fairly small overlap.
Addendum two: in a complex society like the one we live in, we have a lot of dumb rules. I'm not trying to defend them - we should obviously get rid of them, even in healthcare. A lot of economists have written intelligently about how to make the approval process of the FDA more agile.
- _Codemonkeyism 10y agoEvidence A: How Paul defended shady AirBnB tactics here on hackernews.
- yborg 10y agoYes, when you're invested, it's "naughtiness". The only possible crime in that case is failing to produce an acceptable exit with acceptable upside.
- makomk 10y agoEvidence B: His defence of the Y Combinator-funded startup that was paying companies to bundle unwanted software into their installers and tricking users into installing it.
- a_small_island 10y agoI just did a quick google search, are you referring to InstallMonetizer? https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130115/17343321692/why-are-y-combinator-andreessen-horowitz-backing-drive-by-toolbaradware-installer.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130115/17343321692/why-a...
- ACow_Adonis 10y agoA good post, even as one given over to naturally ignoring stupid rules. Many start-ups are engaged in the "flout the law and make abnormal profits by hoping society evolves/decides in our favour" gamble. Uber and Airbnb are two obvious examples, where I'm sure if a couple of people had died in transit, or a house burnt down and killed its occupants, and resulting cases went to court and they were found to have gone against transport/hotelier laws in a jurisdiction, then I imagine the course of such companies would be very different. I'm sure we'll have more interesting case studies that I'm just not as familiar with as we have startups move into other heavily regulated but emergent/disruption ready/ambiguously policed sectors: see drug legalisation, communications/cryptography/security, financial services, legal services, health/pharmacy, etc as logical places where you'd expect to see these gambles starting to show up...
- jacquesm 10y agoI agree strongly with you, which is why I was quite happy when YC published this: http://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/ http://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/ A relatively large number of YC companies had an ethics issue and (unfortunately) the 'naughty' bits have been used to explain these away. So YC evolved and put up a fairly clear-cut set of rules that they expect YC founders to live by.
- SilasX 10y agoI'm not sure how you would get that "don't sell faulty medical devices as legit ones" would be pg's "rules that don't matter". Now, they were certainly exposed and shut down by regulators who are (often) more concerned about the rules that don't matter, but it's really uncharitable to imply he things that accuracy of medical devices is something that "doesn't matter". >Had zenefits managed to grow even more or hire some key lobbyists and get the law changed in time, their CEO would be hailed as a visionary genius that cut through pointless red tape. Not sure that's the best example to make your point -- I think that the Zenefits fiasco exposed something I didn't realize before, that we make brokers go through pointless training that doesn't teach them anything, and doesn't make them better at navigating ethical dilemmas, all because we tolerated fraudulent salesmen giving the defense that, "but no one gave me a training video that told me not to defraud customers!"
- Piloti 10y agoYeah, this is the big thing: it's healthcare. Many people have been screwed over by Uber, Twitter and Airbnb in various ways (blacklisted for trying to start unions, losing their rent-controlled apartments, harassment) but normally not to any great or permanent degree, or not that many people anyway. With healthcare, it's a given that people will die if you do it wrong.