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http://paulgraham.com/founders.html http://paulgraham.com/founders.html "What We Look for in Founders 4. Naughtiness Though the most successful founders are
by dxhdr 10y ago
http://paulgraham.com/founders.html http://paulgraham.com/founders.html
"What We Look for in Founders
4. Naughtiness
Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. 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."
- pstuart 10y agoThen it gets down to: what rules matter?
- saycheese 10y ago"Don't be evil."
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- manarth 10y agoBut when "the ends justify the means"?
- saycheese 10y ago"Do the right thing."
- mcguire 10y agoThe means you use determine the ends you get.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThe ends may justify the means in abstract, but they don't among humans. http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_humans/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_hum...
- RangerScience 10y ago"Fire is hard, cars are hard, and if you think you can fly, start from the ground."
- dhfhduk 10y agoRules don't matter. Ethics do. The former exist in the service of the latter. One problem we have with contemporary US culture is condoning a sort of twisted narcissistic, psychopathic assertion that because competently breaking the rules is sometimes ethical, breaking the rules is a sign of competence.
- throwaway729 10y ago> Morally, they care about getting the big questions right Theranos failed here big time. So did Uber on the HR front at least.
- kelvin0 10y agoYeah, I am quite ambivalent about this 'rule'. I think you start on a slippery slope once you can rationalize this type of behavior. Also, would you be comfortable explaining your actions to a journalist/public? If not, chances are there is shadiness occurring ...
- smallgovt 10y agoWhether you'd be comfortable explaining your actions to a journalist/public is a very poor heuristic for whether your actions are right or wrong. The public/press distort and misreport all the time. There are plenty of reasons to be cautious there.
- kelvin0 10y agoPlease note that I wrote: "If not, CHANCES ARE there is shadiness occurring". I used this to nuance and to denote the fact that this is a rule of thumb, not one of the 10 commandments.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- wahern 10y agoSome rules are best left unstated. By formalizing them everybody is incentivized to stretch them. By formalizing them we fool ourselves into believing that they're more objective than they really are. A [poor] analogy would be false precision. By stating something in overly specific terms we can communicate something completely opposite of what we mean. In the case of something like "naughtiness" there's really no decent way to communicate what the author has in mind, not even in an approximate fashion. It's not reducible to a term divorced from the messy details of real-world context. And that presumes what the author has in mind is at all consistent. Better leave it unstated and leave one's actions to speak in their stead.
- mikekij 10y agoI would argue that: 1) Zenefits having software tools to specifically skirt state laws about employee certification requirements 2) Theranos lying about clinical results 3) Nant misrepresenting order data to their shareholders 4) Uber having a set of formalized HR processes that facilitate the sexual harassment of female employees all go beyond "naughty". Plus, I don't think that PG would be excited about the financial impacts that each of those behaviors have had on the respective companies' share prices if he were a shareholder in those companies.
- burkaman 10y agoI think the issue is "they delight in breaking rules". Why delight in it? There's a big difference between "I'm willing to break minor rules when I have to" and "I enjoy being naughty for its own sake". I suspect its a lot easier to break big rules when you're having fun breaking small ones.
- xapata 10y ago> I suspect its a lot easier to break big rules when you're having fun breaking small ones. That sounds plausible, but I suspect the correlation is very weak. Most people follow rules in a bizarrely idiosyncratic and context-sensitive fashion. For example, taking the escalator when going to the gym to use the stair-master.
- cowsandmilk 10y agoBut some of those companies were breaking the rules that matter. Being 23andMe selling accurate genetic information to their customers outside the purview of the FDA is being naughty. They could do it because the science was there. In the case of Theranos, selling diagnostics that don't work is not being naughty. It isn't evading useless regulation. It is selling pseudoscience. Unfortunately, many investors and the business press cannot tell the difference.
- neurotech1 10y agoAgreed. 23AndMe side-stepped FDA red tape. The thing that annoys me with Theranos was they could have found scientifically justified ways of significantly improving diagnostic efficiency but chose not to. Other startups are working on low-cost methods of providing lab tests in developing areas, without the pseudoscience.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 10y agos/pseudoscience/fraud/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- supercanuck 10y agoThe problem I have with this, is naughtiness only works if everyone else is following the rules. and what rules matter, is retrospective. I was a big proponent of Uber initially, I felt they were doing the right thing, but clearly they have gone down a path that I cannot condone. You need to have a respect for the rule of law and the enforcement of contracts, otherwise, people won't do business with each other or trust one another.
- cityhall 10y agoIn other words he wants founders who will do shady things to make him a profit but not to the point where he loses plausible deniability.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gozur88 10y agoSounds like a good way to back a founder that's going to end up buried in an avalanche of lawsuits.
- sealjam 10y agoThis is effectively Raskolnikov's justification for committing murder in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Sorry for the spoiler, but you've had 150 years to read it.