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I'm guessing this is partly tongue in cheek, but if if you drop the nastiest connotations of such personalities... is it really that surprising? I just watched

I'm guessing this is partly tongue in cheek, but if if you drop the nastiest connotations of such personalities... is it really that surprising? I just watched "wild wild country," so my mind is on a different flavour of euntrepreneurship and euntrepreneurship. But... Jobs, Kalanick, Gates... By all accounts were very difficult people personally & professionally. By most accounts, they crossed all the lines to get where they were trying to go. Can someone who doesn't do that get where they got to? Uber is a good example. They're model of expansion led to Uber being all over the world. Ubers' product meant ignoring, bending & breaking "taxi laws" all over the world. It just couldnt have been done legally, especially given that these are often municipal rules, and Uber operates in thousands of jurisdictions. On the labour side, a standard labour model wouldn't have let them take over the world. Ubers' "gigging" labour model didn't/doesn't have a legal or normative framework. Without bending these rules, they would not have gotten so big, so fast either. These are just the most legible, concrete examples. By all accounts this mentality permeates everything. Move fast and break things, I guess. Break rules, conventions, people.... Some people want to fight for Fabien. Some people want to fight for Xenophon.

jeswin 8y ago
> Jobs, Kalanick, Gates... By all accounts were very difficult people personally & professionally. Why is Gates on that list?
- hueving 8y ago
  Because he was also difficult to work for and had no problem doing "whatever it takes" to win. See Microsoft antitrust lawsuit.
  - rdl 8y ago
    Gates was worse to compete against than to work for, from what I've read/heard (I've never worked for Microsoft myself.)
  - alxlaz 8y ago
    If you read, at the very least, the public accounts of the people who worked with him, you'll find that he came across as a very technically-able, detail-oriented person with pretty sane management style -- certainly far better than Jobs' tantrums.
    - allenbrunson 8y ago
      "And how much do you think a really good programmer should get paid? Around here we pay our best programmers around two thousand dollars per week. Do you think you should be paid more than that?" "I don't know," I replied. I was finally beginning to see where he was coming from. Bill was trying to get me to brag that I could write the application switcher really quickly, so he could justify paying me a lower price for it. "Well, I don't think that you could expect to get more than four thousand dollars per week, tops. Actually, I think that's too much, but let's go with that. If it takes ten weeks, and you get paid four thousand dollars per week, that means you should get paid $40,000 for writing it." $40,000 didn't sound like very much to me, especially if it was as strategic to Microsoft as it seemed to be. I think Bill was expecting me to make a counteroffer, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about selling it to Microsoft regardless of compensation, since it really should eventually be part of the Mac OS. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Was there anything about his treatment of employees in the antitrust lawsuit? I must've missed that.
- em500 8y ago
  Anecdote from Joel Spolsky: " ... “Four,” announced the f[uck] counter, and everyone said, “wow, that’s the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age.” He was, you know, 36. Later I had it explained to me. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.” " https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
  - dalbasal 8y ago
    The exact account I was thinking of when I said, "by all accounts." He's such a sharp pen. Too bad he isn't blogging. I wonder if he's got some new takes. He was a small codeshop CEO when he wrote that. Now a multiunicorn CEO.
wpietri 8y ago
Imagine that we let murderers roam free. Ruthless Mafia-style lunatics would run everything because they'd have their competitors killed. And you'd still be saying, "Can someone who doesn't do that get where they got to?" This is "ends justify the means" thinking. If, on the other hand, we tested everybody for sociopathy before they were allowed to manage other people or manage other people's money, I believe we'd still get at least as much innovation. Probably more, as monopolists like Gates and Kalanick were happy to work to crush competitors. See, e.g., a small sampling of the companies Microsoft screwed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Private https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Private
- dalbasal 8y ago
  That's taking it someplace different... Gates and/or Jobs haven't murdered, to my knowledge. They did break rules though, sometimes laws. More notably the trailblazed rule/law breaking. In some cases this led to rules or laws being renegotiated. I think both taxi laws and labour laws are currently under review in a lot of places, owing to Uber's bulldozing. I'm not making any normative judgements. I'm just correlating such a personality type to certain businesses, at a certain place and time. If you are going to be part of an uber-like story of nothing to global generic within a few years... You are probably working for a rule breaking, screaming unreasonable Jobs type. But... You get to go on adventure in Persia.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    That's an analogy, so of course it's not directly true. But it's not a particularly wild one. Sociopaths will do whatever they can get away with. The dumb ones and the ones with poor impulse control end up in prison. The smart ones stick with abuse that is legal, like Jobsian verbal abuse and Kalanick and Gates's market abuse. Whatever your intent, you are in effect justifying their actions. My point is that you can use your exact logic to justify anything that succeeds at the expense of others. It's used all the time with political leaders in other countries who succeed through violence. Instead of justifying it, we can work to change things. Sexual abuse was perfectly acceptable for decades, probably centuries. But the #MeToo movement shows that standards can change, and that abusers can face accountability. The same sort of change is possible if we want to limit other kinds of abuse. It's up to us.
gkya 8y ago
The actual question here is that whether we want, as the global community, them to get where these people and the like want to go. Otherwise it should not be surprising that the more agressive an entreprise is the more it can penetrate various economical areas.

jeswin 8y ago

> Jobs, Kalanick, Gates... By all accounts were very difficult people personally & professionally. Why is Gates on that list?

hueving 8y ago
Because he was also difficult to work for and had no problem doing "whatever it takes" to win. See Microsoft antitrust lawsuit.
- rdl 8y ago
  Gates was worse to compete against than to work for, from what I've read/heard (I've never worked for Microsoft myself.)
- alxlaz 8y ago
  If you read, at the very least, the public accounts of the people who worked with him, you'll find that he came across as a very technically-able, detail-oriented person with pretty sane management style -- certainly far better than Jobs' tantrums.
  - allenbrunson 8y ago
    "And how much do you think a really good programmer should get paid? Around here we pay our best programmers around two thousand dollars per week. Do you think you should be paid more than that?" "I don't know," I replied. I was finally beginning to see where he was coming from. Bill was trying to get me to brag that I could write the application switcher really quickly, so he could justify paying me a lower price for it. "Well, I don't think that you could expect to get more than four thousand dollars per week, tops. Actually, I think that's too much, but let's go with that. If it takes ten weeks, and you get paid four thousand dollars per week, that means you should get paid $40,000 for writing it." $40,000 didn't sound like very much to me, especially if it was as strategic to Microsoft as it seemed to be. I think Bill was expecting me to make a counteroffer, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about selling it to Microsoft regardless of compensation, since it really should eventually be part of the Mac OS. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Was there anything about his treatment of employees in the antitrust lawsuit? I must've missed that.
em500 8y ago
Anecdote from Joel Spolsky: " ... “Four,” announced the f[uck] counter, and everyone said, “wow, that’s the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age.” He was, you know, 36. Later I had it explained to me. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.” " https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
- dalbasal 8y ago
  The exact account I was thinking of when I said, "by all accounts." He's such a sharp pen. Too bad he isn't blogging. I wonder if he's got some new takes. He was a small codeshop CEO when he wrote that. Now a multiunicorn CEO.

wpietri 8y ago

Imagine that we let murderers roam free. Ruthless Mafia-style lunatics would run everything because they'd have their competitors killed. And you'd still be saying, "Can someone who doesn't do that get where they got to?" This is "ends justify the means" thinking. If, on the other hand, we tested everybody for sociopathy before they were allowed to manage other people or manage other people's money, I believe we'd still get at least as much innovation. Probably more, as monopolists like Gates and Kalanick were happy to work to crush competitors. See, e.g., a small sampling of the companies Microsoft screwed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Private https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Private

dalbasal 8y ago
That's taking it someplace different... Gates and/or Jobs haven't murdered, to my knowledge. They did break rules though, sometimes laws. More notably the trailblazed rule/law breaking. In some cases this led to rules or laws being renegotiated. I think both taxi laws and labour laws are currently under review in a lot of places, owing to Uber's bulldozing. I'm not making any normative judgements. I'm just correlating such a personality type to certain businesses, at a certain place and time. If you are going to be part of an uber-like story of nothing to global generic within a few years... You are probably working for a rule breaking, screaming unreasonable Jobs type. But... You get to go on adventure in Persia.
- wpietri 8y ago
  That's an analogy, so of course it's not directly true. But it's not a particularly wild one. Sociopaths will do whatever they can get away with. The dumb ones and the ones with poor impulse control end up in prison. The smart ones stick with abuse that is legal, like Jobsian verbal abuse and Kalanick and Gates's market abuse. Whatever your intent, you are in effect justifying their actions. My point is that you can use your exact logic to justify anything that succeeds at the expense of others. It's used all the time with political leaders in other countries who succeed through violence. Instead of justifying it, we can work to change things. Sexual abuse was perfectly acceptable for decades, probably centuries. But the #MeToo movement shows that standards can change, and that abusers can face accountability. The same sort of change is possible if we want to limit other kinds of abuse. It's up to us.

gkya 8y ago

The actual question here is that whether we want, as the global community, them to get where these people and the like want to go. Otherwise it should not be surprising that the more agressive an entreprise is the more it can penetrate various economical areas.