One of our axioms at Y Combinator is not to think of deal flow as a zero-sum game. Our main focus is to encourage more startups to happen, not to win a larger s

One of our axioms at Y Combinator is not to think of deal flow as a zero-sum game. Our main focus is to encourage more startups to happen, not to win a larger share of the existing stream. When I read this it reminded me of the good things that Google does to make the internet easier and faster. It's self-interested -- the better the internet gets, the more people click on their ads -- but in an inclusive way: there are auxiliary benefits that accrue to a lot of third parties (like me, using Chrome right now). In YC's case, that would be the population of startup founders and anyone who benefits from the startups they found. I like it when companies behave this way. Maybe there are degrees of self-interest and this is a more enlightened one. It's too much to expect companies to do good things irrespective of their self-interest, but not too much to expect the above, especially if it turns out that they end up making more money this way. Then others will have a narrow and greedy reason to go down a broader and more generous path. Lest this seem like nothing much, it wasn't so long ago that people in this position thought primarily in terms of controlling and crushing. The difference may be one of degree, but it's not just rhetorical.