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PG wrote an essay about how he and and Sam Altman prefer to invest in companies that run scams, as long as they aren't too evil. Remember that AirBnB's first m
by lonelappde 7y ago
PG wrote an essay about how he and and Sam Altman prefer to invest in companies that run scams, as long as they aren't too evil.
Remember that AirBnB's first marketing campaign was hiring women (or men using female names online) to violate Craiglist ToS to spam people posting housing listings.
http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
- yesenadam 7y ago>...Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. ...They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination. >...we asked [Sam] what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. That's what you meant?! I can't see which other part you might mean - it's only 750 words. Describing it as "an essay about how he and Sam Altman prefer to invest in companies that run scams" seems as misleading as the worst of the deceptive AirBnB descriptions written about on this page. Maybe you meant to link to a different essay.
- kmonsen 7y agoI think the parents is somewhat justified, there is a very fine line between "hacking" as described here and scammy. It is almost inevitable it gets to AirBnB level if that is your thought process. Would be interesting to hear their take on issues like airbnb are facing, and if they thinking this "room owners" in these cases are also "hacking".