119 ms·

Billionaires Build

• brendanfalk 6y ago
  With tens of thousands of people applying to YC every batch, this will probably go down as one of PG’s most popular essays
  • brendanfalk 6y ago
    And although only a small portion of applicants are invited to an interview, the application is quite similar to the interview
• mosselman 6y ago
  The table layout of the HTML makes this unsuited for reader mode in Firefox. Luckily Pocket _is_ able to convert this into something readable. I get the retro-appeal this has, but user-friendly it is not.
• avthar 6y ago
  I'm curious about advice folks would give for remote YC final interviews vs in person ones?
  • bdickason 6y ago
    Coming from someone who conducts lots of remote job interviews (not yc), some basics still apply: 1. Make sure you have solid internet, switch off your video if audio is breaking up. 2. Invest in a cheap mic (e.g. $20 lavalier) so you can be heard clearly and headphones so you can hear clearly w/ no echo. 3. You can’t read the room / body language as well so make sure you pause occasionally and ensure you’re answering the question sufficiently. 4. Like any interview, undertake a calming exercise beforehand (deep breathing etc)
• obilgic 6y ago
  off-topic: I have been actively participating in HN since 2010, and recently I started seeing prominent tech people on twitter backlash against pg. Not sure if It was there before, or if I'm barely noticing this. i.e. many of them show screenshots of getting banned by pg on twitter. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1329094570056032264 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1329094570056032264
  • TigeriusKirk 6y ago
    Fashions come and go. Anyone screenshotting being blocked by anyone is definitely trading in fashion.
  • Swizec 6y ago
    pg has fallen out of touch. The world is very different for the young ones. I’m not old but my tech career started back around 2007. It was very different. Back then tech was exciting and new. We were changing the world. Now we have changed the world. Mobile is king, web is emperor. We’ve won. Tech is to 2020 what finance was to 1980. And VCs are seen as the big baddies. People don’t join this industry for the love of nerdy tech anymore. They come because it’s where ambitious people go.
    • whalesalad 6y ago
      Been following you for a long time and also share a similar tenure. Your comment here is completely spot on.
    • Benjammer 6y ago
      I'm even less old, my career started in 2009. My personal experience was that people back then were both more nerdy and more ambitious, not a tradeoff. And now people are "ambitious" but it's a personal ambition to play the game and earn more money than their peers. The people I worked with in 2009 were ambitious in the sense of building products and teams and companies to succeed in the marketplace, or creating new marketplaces. It seems like tech is where greedy people go nowadays, not ambitious people in any greater sense of ambition in the world at large.
      • birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
        Where can one find the ambitious people of 2009 to build products and teams and companies? Asking for a friend.
        • Benjammer 6y ago
• daedalus6174 6y ago
  One mistake pg makes here is assuming that to be an exploitative billionaire you have to be good at exploiting people or have personal manipulative qualities. You don’t. Owning a large company in a capitalist system is inherently exploitative. Simply owning a large company and taking surplus value from a large number of people is exploitation.
  • thorough 6y ago
    Hypothetical question: I have little money but I write an amazing book and it sells to millions. Each books takes, say, $5 to print, and yet I sell it for $15. Therefore I end up wealthy from this endeavor. Did I exploit the people who chose to buy my book? The people who printed it?
    • 666lumberjack 6y ago
      Did you personally sell millions of books on your own? Probably you used some service like amazon in order to sell those books and fulfil the orders, in this hypothetical, in which case the lefty argument would be that you are indirectly profiting from the exploitation of both amazon's workers and the employees of the printing company.
  • QueensGambit 6y ago
    "Simply owning a large company and taking surplus value from a large number of people is exploitation." Who are these large number of people? Customers or suppliers? In socialism, customers are usually held captive because of limited suppliers. In capitalism, suppliers are usually held captive because of fierce competition to get customers. Neither sounds inherent exploitation by the entrepreneur.
    • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      I believe that the claim is that the workers are exploited, because they produced value but received less than the value they produced. And that does sound like exploitation. But consider the alternative. Let's say that every worker was paid for the full value that they produced. That would mean that the profit of every company was $0, because the workers got all the value produced. How many companies would we have? Probably not very many. Risk my capital to start a business, for a return of $0? Yeah, no. I'll pass. So will most people. And that would mean that we wouldn't have the things that large businesses produce, from computers to airplanes to vaccines. Even for the workers, is that a net win? I don't think so.
• staunch 6y ago
  1. I think if PG was being honest with himself, he'd admit that they spend only 10 minutes interviewing because he personally wouldn't want to be stuck in a room with someone he doesn't like for longer. That's a weakness of someone who clearly disdains anyone he views as a lesser mind (see: "culture fit"). Making snap judgments about people seems to be one of his major personality flaws. Steve Jobs had the same flaw, so it's clearly not professionally debilitating, but it is reprehensible nonetheless. 2. YC could make the process less fickle and far more objective by having each startup get interviewed for 10 minutes by each partner, rather than in a high pressure groupthink session. It would cost no more of their time. And of course, they could also just increase the time and interview just as many startups as they want. YC partners could treat it like a real job with hard work, rather than act like lazy VCs. Anyone who has interviewed people knows that first impressions are often wrong, and yet YC bases their decisions entirely on first impressions, which is both funny and sad. 3. It's likely that YC's success is based on their much-more objective application process, and the interview is random noise in the process. It is probably even worse than random noise and YC might be 2-10x more successful just by eliminating the interview stage. 4. PG has no true idea how other YC partners make their decisions, it's likely to be very far from his own process, making his advice inaccurate and harmful to founders.
• damnencryption 6y ago
  PG was cheering lambda school's free 4 weeks developer intern trial a while ago. If he doesn't think that is exploitative, maybe huge difference in morality. Airbnb spamming forums early on, sketchy marketing techniques, avoiding commercial regulations that hotel has to go through for good reasons and displacing genuine local rent seekers is not exploitative then maybe the bar is high enough for YC. Should the founder have to think about whether the idea could potentially be exploitative or he just needs to think about what is good for the users aka not exploiting the tourists?
  • an_opabinia 6y ago
    Airbnb feels like a very bad example. It’s rich people renting out their homes to other rich people. You’re saying that’s more exploitative than rich people renting out those same homes to poor people? How do you think that really pans out?
    • damnencryption 6y ago
      No. Residential areas are different from commercial areas in good parts of the world for a reason. This is not a bad example. Many people took loans to buy airbnb to aggressively rent them. Criminal activity go through roof with tourists in the neighborhood. You don't know who your neighbors are because they keep changing. It doesn't feel safe to let your 10 year old son out for many. Drugs, garbage on the road, covid hot spots. Hotels also have to pay taxes which airbnb avoids. Price in the area goes up for locals. People move out to surrounding areas and have to commute more.
      • an_opabinia 6y ago
        Would you say this collection of things you’re describing is, “AirBnb is exploiting someone?” Anyway, there’s basically no evidence for any of what you’re saying, especially the crime part. The one not-yet-peer reviewed paper trying to show Airbnb’s causal effect on rents found a $9/yr increase (1), which is laughably, hilariously small - it could not possibly be playing a significant role in rent pricing in the biggest markets, and the researchers specifically excluded the possibility of AirBnb reducing supply. And this factual criticism is the one you actually omitted! (1) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006832 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3006832
• an_opabinia 6y ago
  > Mark Zuckerberg wanted to engage online with his college friends. His problem was being a horny brat. I am pretty confident Hot or Not would not have passed muster with Jessica Livingston. Also even if he had shown Paul Graham the earliest Facebook numbers, the partner panel could very well just say those numbers were faked, which the Friendster people purely out of spite would say, and what would they do, call a college freshman about how much she uses Facebook?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• glaive123 6y ago
  > that the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people Any statement that has the word "only" in it is guaranteed to be wrong. I wonder if PG worded it this way intentionally (straw man fallacy). Most people agree early employees should get more equity. This doesn't address whether startup founders are hoarding equity for themselves and their investors instead of fairly rewarding early employees.
  • Taylor_OD 6y ago
    Isn't that true though? A millionaire? Sure there are a lot of ways to get there. A Billionaire? There are only 2000~. Are there any notable ones who got there without exploiting people or building/aided in building a business that does?
    • nverno 6y ago
      I don't think someone like Warren Buffet 'exploits' anyone in particular. Of course you might have a very loose definition of exploitation.
      • applecore 6y ago
        A lot of Berkshire Hathaway's businesses sell overpriced sugar or cheap junk.
    • monknomo 6y ago
      well, in the really pedantic sense, you could inherit a billion dollars and not exploit anyone. It may be difficult to hang onto without a certain level of exploitation
  • dkyc 6y ago
    I wouldn't say this is a straw man. Every billionaire being exploitative/criminal is a real political position among the American Left, see e.g. this tweet [0] by Robert Reich. He was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, so not some extremist weirdo. [0] https://twitter.com/rbreich/status/1193526297647108097 https://twitter.com/rbreich/status/1193526297647108097
• waisbrot 6y ago
  It's a pretty poor argument when your own summary of the opposing side > the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people needs to be revised to a keener straw-man in your very next paragraph: > the key to becoming a billionaire — the defining feature of billionaires — was to exploit people Here he's swapping necessary-but-not-sufficient for definitionally-equal-to.
  • travisjungroth 6y ago
    And then later brings up that there are exploitative people that aren’t billionaires. Never is the central point, that exploitation is necessary for becoming a billionaire, ever refuted.
• stopachka 6y ago
  From experience, this rings very, very true. For many, this is a hard pill to swallow. Here's one way to judge it more objectively. Replace "billionaire", with something more neutral: "pro basketball player", "amazing musician", "prolific writer". The arguments tend to make a lot of sense in other categories, but our natural inclination rebels on Billionaire. This is a great sign that something is off
  • travisjungroth 6y ago
    All three are of your examples are wildly different in that they’re top-tier individual contributors. Of course you can become a prolific writer without exploiting anyone. A more fair comparison would be something like politician.
    • stopachka 6y ago
      I think billionaires are much closer to what I mentioned than to politicians. You can tell this by the fact that most billionaires have engineering degrees or were tinkerers. One defining quality is that billionaires need to scale work that often involves management. In this case consider prolific basketball coaches, or generals in war. The reason I shy away from including politicians, is because their m.o is starkly different: it’s all about status.
      • travisjungroth 6y ago
        Sure, coaches and generals are also much better comparison. Either way, I think your argument is weak. “Sure you feel this away about billionaires. But change ‘billionaire’ to something different and your feelings change.” Well, duh. That’s not even an analogy. You’re just literally changing the subject of the sentence. Billionaires are super different than writers in ways that are relevant to this discussion.
        • stopachka 6y ago
          My argument is more like this: Most people have a natural bias towards billionaires. To remove the particulars of the essay, to look at it with fresh eyes. Yes, indeed it changes things, and no one change will map completely. Do this a few times though and a clearer sight comes through
• fizzyfizz 6y ago
  If rich people are so great, why do founders not want to work for them?
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    Presumably because they also want to be rich people?
    • monknomo 6y ago
      Working for rich people prevents you from being rich?
      • MattGaiser 6y ago
        Doesn't let you be the same category of rich.
  • TigeriusKirk 6y ago
    Because they don't want to work for anyone?
  • ashika 6y ago
    founders that talk to pg are still working for rich people. they just negotiated a longer leash and more food.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• tines 6y ago
  > The crucial feature of the initial market is that it exist. Should "exist" be replaced with "exists" in this sentence? If you wanted to use "exist" I think you'd have to use a helper verb like "should [exist]". Is there a name for the grammatical feature where someone omits the "should" and uses the conjugation that would go with it?
  • buu700 6y ago
    There's nothing grammatically wrong with that. It's a standard subjunctive clause.
    • tines 6y ago
      That's the word I was looking for, thanks.
• Traster 6y ago
  For a clearly smart guy it's so frustrating to see PG bring in a topic like the Billionaires being exploitative, and then taking such a thoroughly blinkered view. It's a massive blind spot that PG fails to address is that it's the exact same sense of mission that he sees in start ups that creates the permission structure to exploit people. It's not that people set out to exploit people and as a result they become billionares. It's that their focus on their goal allows exploitation to happen as a by product. It's not that Uber set out to exploit drivers, it's just that get their business to scale they had to lure drivers in with big incentives, and then in order to make their business viable they had to then force their costs down to the point where drivers are paid less than the cost of vehicle maintenance. It's just a bizarre primary school understanding or morality where there's a group of "Good" people and "Bad" people.
  • bob33212 6y ago
    Right, Bezos didn't set out to bankrupt as many small businesses as he could. He started with providing a wider range of books to people over the internet. For the person who wanted a specific book and was only able to get it on Amazon this is a "good" thing. For the local bookstore who is now bankrupt that is a "bad" thing. I've come to the conclusion that to be a CEO you have to wear these blinders and have faith that overall your company is a positive good for the world. That means that when you have a low performing employee you have to fire him even though you know that it may cause terrible consequences for him and his family.
    • SQueeeeeL 6y ago
      "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
      • specialist 6y ago
        Yes, and: Everyone's the hero of their own story.
    • MattGaiser 6y ago
• dustingetz 6y ago
  Billionaire can also be framed as succeeding at creating a power differential at scale. The trick is that you can't achieve scale without using power differentials, and iphones are the fruit of scale. Idea: what you kind of want is for the power difference to decay at scale, so that way you don't have amazon workers pissing in water bottles. Remember: "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value" [1] – I wonder if PG has read that? [1] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-hate-your-family/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...
  • Emphere 6y ago
    Very good, something I have been thinking about as well. Inequality is bad because of the massive power differentials. How do you propose we "solve" that while still being able to reap the benefits of scale? Any pointers or books to read about this topic? Admittedly I haven't looked too hard.
    • dustingetz 6y ago
      Idea for the solution is to get everyone together to opt-in to a value system that demonizes excess accumulation. That sounds crazy/impossible today, but on lets say, a 2000 year timespan could we get there? 2000 years ago, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" was a seminal idea, eventually resulting in the world today where killing is demonized and this is existence proof of a solution. We can then abstract to the general class of game theory coordination dilemmas stuck at backstab/backstab, of which both covid and climate change are instances. The will/power of billions of people outweighs the power of a few (regardless of how concentrated the wealth is as wealth is an abstraction), and the internet offers a means for billions of people to coordinate. I conclude that the needed points of leverage are available today/ right now and simply awaiting a great leader to recognize the opportunity, figure out the play and execute it. And the way ideas spread online, I bet the world can reconfigure itself in not 2000 years, but 20 - a single business cycle.
      • johndevor 6y ago
        Define "excess" I'm glad people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates have billions of dollars - they're solving some of the world's hardest challenges right now with their wealth.
• TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  My first thought was that PG made a mistake blending these two topics since the discussion of what works in a YC interview is being short-circuited by the reflexive political discussion of billionaires. My second thought is that it wasn't a mistake.
  • simonebrunozzi 6y ago
    Ah, I see what you did here. Brilliant.
• troughway 6y ago
  Can someone pin point what is objectively wrong or out of touch with this article? Genuinely asking because the past three+ posts from pg have been met with negativity saying pg is a wealthy Londoner who doesn’t understand the prole struggle.
  • throwaway2245 6y ago
    I don't really think this is a new theme for pg's essays [edit: I mean, I don't think pg's style or content has changed that much], although I've also noticed this change [in responses here]. Usually, HN is the space where his essays are most heavily defended.
    • troughway 6y ago
      This is certainly a newer-ish theme. I am not sure where the bitterness comes, and to be honest, I would like to know. We are reading the same essays. More and more I am starting to think that people who are decrying pg's writing should come clean and say whether or not they've started a business, and if so, what was the outcome. The outcome isn't as relevant, but I bet there are very few people out there who have reached, lets call it "Fuck You" money through running their own business who would read this essay and go "Hah he's so out of touch he doesn't even see it anymore" and toss some link about Dunning-Kruger or whatever. For people who are in the business of making money through getting shit built, I think what he's saying will resonate just fine. But then again it's one of those things where the people who need it the most are the least likely ones to take it, and vice versa. It's akin to the "It's a good problem to have" crowd when you say how you're sick of dealing with clients on the phone even though you have a 200-person company, and they look at you sideways because they have no idea why you are complaining. He's talking about billionaires and interviews in this one, and he starts off saying how the two threads are connected. But what he's really talking about is building-a-business-by-convincing-people-you're-not-full-of-hot-air. And unfortunately, when I see people tearing his essays apart, their ramblings strike me as nothing but hot air. I think it's HN who is out of touch more than pg is, because I don't think the vast majority are here to build businesses whatsoever.
• fudged71 6y ago
  What about that YC application question “what real world system have you successfully hacked?” In many ways that could be seen as how you can exploit people
• deleted 6y ago
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• yetanothermonk 6y ago
  It’s so strange the YC comments and some Twitter comments are so focused on the billionaire part. The real part is to deeply understand your users, no? And the focus on YC interviews is reminiscent of media is the massage—-the hubbub places YC as a thing to pass but if you understand your users deeply, you won’t even need YC. In a way all the YC interview prep stuff is written for the wrong people (for YC, and this is obviously a little wrong) but also the right people (who will chase prestige to read the article about interviewing at YC).
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • dang 6y ago
    I felt the same way but pg has since changed the title from "What You Can Learn from How to Ace a YC Interview" to "Billionaires Build" so he obviously wants to emphasize that aspect.
    • yetanothermonk 6y ago
      Thanks for the heads up. The old title was also clickbaity but this new title is even more so. I wonder if even HN comment reactions are more towards the title vs the content.
      • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        I think there's an inevitable framing effect. There are lots of points I'd agree with if presented in isolation, and indeed PG has written solid essays before on the general topic of how destructive it is to say that business owners can only make money by exploiting others. But it's hard to talk about those things when the article explicitly builds towards a thesis that billionaires are great and all good YC founders should want to be one.
        • yetanothermonk 6y ago
          One way I could hear people interpreting your comment--I agree on the framing point by the way, there's also external framing now with a hate-billionaires view--is that the steps to get to the thesis make sense but the thesis is not palatable. I'm not sure you'd agree with that interpretation of your comment; I'd love to hear what the problem is with that interpretation
• Meekro 6y ago
  Some of the most successful YC companies are: Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Gusto, Reddit, and Gitlab. I guess DoorDash and Instacart are accused of participating in the exploitative gig economy. Airbnb is accused of circumventing hotel laws (is that exploitation?) The other 7 on my list are pretty okay though, right?
  • jtsiskin 6y ago
    Yeah, this is a great point. It’s easy to think that most of their companies are explorative, because those companies quickly come to mind. But if you actually scroll through the list of them, https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/, most seem beneficial to society
  • akavi 6y ago
    Coinbase arguably is just a casino in another form. Reddit's incentives are aligned towards a similar addictive loop as Facebook. Stripe, Cruise, Dropbox, Gusto, and Gitlab are pretty unassaible IMO, though.
    • nostrademons 6y ago
      There's always ways of looking at things negatively: Stripe = Eat the gift economy and replace it with monetized capitalism. Cruise = Mass unemployment for truckdrivers, plus inevitable computer-controlled accidents. DropBox = Oh noes, your files belong to a company and you don't have physical possession of them anymore. Gusto = [...I'm having a hard time here, people still need to get paid and ADP sucks.] Maybe "encouraging people to start businesses who would be better off in stable employment". Gitlab = Think of all the potential copyright infringement! The question is - which negative things do you want to believe? And how do they compare to the positive things the company does? It takes a minimum amount of effort to dream up something bad about a company's core value proposition, but that's not the whole company, unless you put blinders on.
  • Siira 6y ago
    Most of the people I know here (in Iran, no AirBnB clone yet) rent personal houses when they travel. Some people (including myself) have enough money (and an aversion to risk) that we prefer hotels, but the vast majority don’t need what extra hotels offer and don’t want to pay for them. The extra expenses (here at least) are not explained by taxes (similar hotel offerings are around 5x the price).
• jlarocco 6y ago
  "Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to engage online with his college friends. Larry and Sergey wanted to find things on the web." These are terrible examples in the context of the article. Apple's computers, originally, led them to the brink of bankruptcy, and it wasn't until 20 years later when they started selling consumer electronics that they blew up, and Wozniak had little to do with it at that point. The other two don't actually make money from the products mentioned, but by flat out exploiting people's ignorance regarding online tracking and advertising.
  • monocasa 6y ago
    Apple blew up far before they fell in the late 80s/early 90s. Woz's designs were very much a huge part of that.
• taytus 6y ago
  >Keep reading, and you'll learn both simultaneously. That's quite the healthy ego. No. You will try to explain it, it doesn't mean you will succeed. I'm ready for the downvotes.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  Wasn't interested in the billionaire part (not because I disagree but because I don't care either way on it). But the other bits are good. If the other comments put you off, read it anyway and skip the billionaire bits.
• deleted 6y ago
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• antisocial 6y ago
  " by making things that genuinely delight its customers." - sure all these mindless, addictive apps, sites like Facebook, Instagram, binge watching on Netflix, time sink like YouTube are all genuinely delighting me, I walk away feeling great about myself. Glossing over important aspects to either feel good about themselves or to project as do-gooders is not going unnoticed.
• 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  One great question to ask and be prepared to answer: What is the most important aspect of this idea that you don't know? It's as important to have thought about where you need to focus and and the consequences of not addressing it, as knowing what the potential upside is for the idea.
• teej 6y ago
  How many billionaires (paper or cash) has YC produced?
  • jtsiskin 6y ago
    If you looked at the evaluations, then look at the % founder ownership, https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ - at least a few
• aliceryhl 6y ago
  > If Boom manages to ship an airliner at all, international airlines will have to buy it. That isn't obvious considering the concorde failed.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    Well, its obvious, though not in the sense the author intended: its not like there are airliner retail stores to which airliners are shipped in hopes that someone will walk-in and buy them. Airliners are shipped -- and built --- in response to firm orders; if no one buys them, nothing is shipped. But its quite possible that they could get something certified and theoretically sellable but not have something that the economics make any sense for airlines to actually purchase, much less such a clear case that international airlines are generally compelled to do so.
• mgdev 6y ago
  Buildionaires.
• kgog 6y ago
  love to see pg get more out of touch with every single passing day.
  • BoiledCabbage 6y ago
    It's been pretty incredible to watch the transformation honestly. I can't recall what post it was earlier that made it pretty bare. I think it was his reinterpretation of "things that can't be said" to be the exact opposite of speaking truth to power, but instead was along the lines of "people in power are having to deal with consequences of their actions that their money can't save them from. And that's bad." Yeah and people without money/power also have to deal with the consequences of our actions. That's a normal facet of life. All the above is very loose of what he said and I honestly stopped paying attention to his posts and barely remember the details now. Someone else likely can make many corrections to what I wrote above. But honestly the plight of the billionaire gets even less empathy from me right now given what people are living through in 2020.
    • abvdasker 6y ago
      Yes, that was also the blog post which first raised alarm bells for me. The whole time I was reading it I got this sinking feeling. I couldn’t help but wonder to myself, why is PG being so coy here? What is it that he really wants to say but is afraid to? The fact that he thinks it would be too socially costly for him to say it means it might be pretty bad... I had my guesses then, and as his posts have become increasingly conservative I’m more confident than ever that I correctly identified the subtext of his words.
  • dang 6y ago
    pg hasn't changed a bit, as far as I can tell. Surrounding conditions (e.g. the political and media climate) have changed a lot, plus there are the expectations people have from anyone they perceive as rich and famous. He ignores that kind of expectation, which pisses a lot of people off—but this is nothing new. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25233038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25233038
    • 6y ago
• camgunz 6y ago
  pg's priors are wrong. He would be correct if all or even lots of the world's billionaires were picked by YC, but they aren't. Sure, it may be possible to become a billionaire or build a billion dollar company without exploiting others, even as those others do not become billionaires themselves. But is it even worth parsing this out? Income inequality is real, capitalism is fundamentally exploitative at its core, end of argument. YC's interview process is... not at all relevant. > I'll tell you how it's really done, so you can at least tell your own kids the truth. It's all about users. The most reliable way to become a billionaire is to start a company that grows fast, and the way to grow fast is to make what users want. There's a second part, and it's "hoard the profit by under paying the workers who built your company." Sometimes there's a third part, and it's "corrupt your government and lobby against tax rates that threaten your wealth." Billionaires build, let's stipulate. They also hoard money for themselves while others desperately need it. It's not any more complicated than that.
• cma 6y ago
  > That's the great thing about market economies. If other people both knew about this need and were able to satisfy it, they already would be, and there would be no room for your startup. > Which means the conversation during your YC interview will have to be about something new: either a new need, or a new way to satisfy one. I'm fairly sure they also look for a moat don't they?
• phnofive 6y ago
  ‘Make something people want’ is hard for me to understand - is this a fair expansion? Make something people want that can evolve into a commodity, ensure only the inventor can profit (e.g. with IP protections), and architect your business such that returns scale independently of operation costs.
  • BryanBeshore 6y ago
    Inverse the phrase to be 'Make something people do not want'. I doubt people have built successful companies, and become 'billionaires' by building something people do not want.
    • phnofive 6y ago
      Nor by forming a B corporation... as far as I know.
  • julienb_sea 6y ago
    Just because people want it doesn't mean it is a commodity or can be commoditized. We can argue that a social network is borderline commoditized, and yet the value of each network is defined by its user base and their commitment - not something that is a commodity in any imaginable sense.
  • 8note 6y ago
    The last one seems like the most important one for producing billionaires. That ensures that the owner class gets the benefits
• mbgerring 6y ago
  Ctrl-F “employees” 0 results It’s crazy that so many of these companies with billionaire founders have thousands of employees who are not billionaires, nor have a meaningful stake in the decisions the company makes. Wonder what that’s about.
  • marcinzm 6y ago
    Nothing is stopping those employees from taking all the risks and starting their own businesses. Of course they'll give up their stable consistent paychecks and benefits for possibly years with only a small chance of high returns. Lower risk, lower reward.
    • eloisant 6y ago
      Yes they can, but they won't get anywhere unless... They get employees of their own. That's the whole point.
    • mbgerring 6y ago
      Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that there are plenty of factors preventing some people from taking risks, and insulating and enabling others. You might even find that many of these factors are predictable and systemic!
    • inerte 6y ago
      At a personal level, a lot, if not most, billionaires never risked anything the vast majority of their employees would have to risk. They were either already rich-enough (or _very_ rich like Bezos), or from families that can support them if something fails. At a company / systemic level, if say Musk or Bezos fail right now, their companies might be at risk and that can lead to thousands of people unemployed. But they already reaped the fruits high reward you're talking about. And a LOT of people take the risks you're talking about, since new businesses are started everyday. But we're talking about billionaires in this context, and the current crop took a risk that the general population would consider it negligible.
    • camgunz 6y ago
      Not everyone has the resources to be a founder. Even just starting a very basic business takes resources, but if we're talking YC tech startups, that's stuff like Ivy League schools, tech chops, good network connections, the ability to potentially not build wealth for years. It takes a ton of privilege, on average, and that just magnifies.
• ardy42 6y ago
  > But aptitude for exploiting people is not what Y Combinator looks for at all. In fact, it's the opposite of what they look for. I'll tell you what they do look for, by explaining how to convince Y Combinator to fund you, and you can see for yourself. I mean, of course. Y Combinator is looking first and foremost for people who will make them billions in the aggregate. Most of those people who pass the interview will personally fail to join the billionaire club. Also, its not like "building" and "exploiting" are mutually exclusive.
  • dang 6y ago
    > Y Combinator is looking first and foremost for people who will make them billions in the aggregate Since the only way this happens is by funding founders who go on to build big successes, you're confirming what pg said.
    • ardy42 6y ago
      > Since the only way this happens is by funding founders who go on to build big successes, you're confirming what pg said. He seems to be trying to make a general statement about billionaires or becoming a billionaire, but he's really only talking about a certain kind of potential billionaire that's suitable input for the VC business. His working definition of exploitation also seems to be far more limited in scope than the one the "mistaken" "politicians" use. Even someone who's kind and considerate to everyone around them can build system that exploits people.
  • julienb_sea 6y ago
    If your startup makes your investors billions, you are probably becoming a billionaire in the process or pretty close.
    • ardy42 6y ago
      > If your startup makes your investors billions, you are probably becoming a billionaire in the process or pretty close. Most startups fail, though.
• m_ke 6y ago
  Valley billionaires used to build, now they mostly extract value by using their financial leverage to starve out the competition, operating at a loss and screwing the workers in the process. Their money is not made on profit margins, instead it is based on ballooning valuations, propped up by turning other peoples money into artificial growth. Raising billion dollar funds and living off of the carry while you pump and dump the next monopoly is a much better life than "building". Even the "builders" like Google and Apple are moving away from building and are starting to embrace rent seeking.
• daralthus 6y ago
  Not sure what to make of this. Billionaire companies != seed funded startups. The exploitation really kicks into gear after you have 5000 employees and there are many inflection points of power differentials until then. Each not as a big deal, but slowly eroding some rights the farther and lower you go.
  • dcolkitt 6y ago
    The evidence is indisputable that workers at large firms have substantially higher productivity than small firms.[1] Big business also pays its workers substantially higher wages. If your model of big business is that it's a tool for exploiting workers, you'd expect the opposite of this dynamic. Instead the economics is pretty clear that most large firms create synergies that empower individual workers to produce much more than they'd be capable of individually or in small, informal organizations. As a bonus, the sizable bulk of this productivity surplus accumulates in the form of higher wages to the workers themselves. Big business accomplishes this by consistently applying the best practices in organizational management[2]. In contrast small business tends to be much more sloppily managed with a lot more decisions made haphazardly, with many more decisions being made for individual gain rather than the good of the organization as a whole. If anything the balance of the evidence would make a much stronger case that small business is really more exploitative than big business. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/117089?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/117089?seq=1 [2] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.24.1.203 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.24.1.203
    • Lendal 6y ago
      The question though is why shouldn't those workers receive a larger share of their own productivity gains? As we work harder, we should receive more. But since the mid-1970's workers have received only a fraction of their own productivity gains. Most of that value is being sucked upward. It wasn't always this way.
      • dcolkitt 6y ago
        Average worker compensation has nearly doubled in the past 20 years.[1] Almost exactly in line with aggregate productivity levels.[2] What I'm guessing you're referring to is median household income. Which is a quite different number than mean worker income. The former has stagnated relative to the latter primarily because a massive number of prime-aged workers, in particular young men, have dropped out of the labor pool.[3] Why that's happened is an entire question all on its own. But one thing is clear, the reason for it certainly can't be big businesses exploiting labor, because by definition the unemployed aren't working for anybody at all. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/243846/total-compensation-per-employee-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/243846/total-compensatio... [2] https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-productivity-slowdown-since-the-great-recession.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-pro... [3] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/pdf/labor-force-participation-what-has-happened-since-the-peak.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/pdf/labor-force-pa...
• aresant 6y ago
  I imagine that the mantra "billionaires build" was first seeded in the head of a young, newly rich PG after selling Viaweb. As PG is likely on the cusp of "billionairehood" this essay follows his typically cathartic & open writing style - one part personal reconciliation, one part insight After selling viaweb in 1998 PG's options probably looked like -> -=> Option 1 "Hit the beach" -=> Option 2 "How far can we take this" -=> Option 3 "What can we give back" Very early stage investment is an exercise in patience. The genesis of YC (after giving a "free" talk at Harvard around startups) says PG first chose to keep going and combined it with a desire to be helpful to other entrepreneurs YC has had huge wins before, PG is a very wealthy man. But nothing on the scale of what YC will collect from AirBNB and Stripe in the near future In 2020 these essays being seasoned with a "billionaire" flavoring is not disconnected from that coming windfall and PG's need to reconcile I for one am looking forward to watching PG navigate his continued transition I would be personally surprised if along the way he didn't launch an improved and more actionable "Giving Pledge" like organization for his final act
• tmcw 6y ago
  56% of billionaires build. 44% of billionaires inherit.
  • RestlessMind 6y ago
    This is an amazing nugget which should be the context for any controversial discussion about "Billionaires". I have utmost respect for the former category, but I also believe that the later category should not exist (as in those people should exist but they should not have any unearned billions and all the unearned power and privileges that come with it).
    • austinpena 6y ago
      You don’t believe that if someone makes billions they should be able to pass it on to their children?
      • chillwaves 6y ago
        Do you believe in meritocracy? Because ownership of that amount of wealth is surely going to skew the entire system. How long before we just have a permanent ruling class, and how does that move humanity forward?
        • eej71 6y ago
          There is always more wealth to create.
          • chillwaves 6y ago
            r > g, where r is the rate of return and g is the overall economic growth of the economy. It means the rich capture a growing portion of productivity, and in modern days it is on the strength of the financialization of productivity, not necessarily people actually doing work. How is this an optimal system? How is it even a functioning system? What we are doing as a species, today, right now, is not working and our ability to live on this planet is increasingly in danger.
• nashashmi 6y ago
  Tl;dr YC looks for founders who understand users and can make what they want. Understanding users is hard. That is why Facebook and google data collect. Making what they want is technically challenging. That is why intelligence is required.
• tekdude 6y ago
  I think one issue with this viewpoint is that while a successful company may be doing wonderful things for its users... not everyone is a user. Even the users themselves are not users 100% of the time. So, even if a company is not actively exploiting its workforce, customers, or suppliers, it might be exploiting its non-users without ever giving them much opportunity to object. Again, Airbnb is probably the best example: users who book stays and users who rent out rooms/homes may love the service, but other people who live in those neighborhoods or buildings may not. Airbnb overrides those objections by exploiting a few issues: ambiguities in local laws; inadequate enforcement agencies who cannot handle the number of listings in their area; the inability of local residents to sufficiently organize and force their local governments to prioritize enforcement, etc...
  • coward8675309 6y ago
    Airbnb is a great example: While I love the company's product — I've stayed at Airbnbs dozens of times — the company does generate negative externalities, and the company has done what I'd consider shady things (mostly astroturfing and other aggressive PR moves) to get itself past the profitability finish line. Once we get back to the world, I'll surely use Airbnb again, but I have a nuanced attitude about the the pros and cons of the company's offerings, both as a stayer and a citizen. What PG doesn't address (which isn't his goal, so no dig intended) is a bigger issue than the immortal souls of founders and billionaires: Bad things happen just as often as a result of good people with good intentions as they do from the diabolical acts of sociopaths. That truth is equally under-appreciated by both American progressives and the well-meaning people who help create big problems even as they create joy for billions.
  • ohashi 6y ago
    Wonder if we will look at this like climate change that the oil companies knew about decades ago.
    • canofbars 6y ago
      Everyone knew about this decades ago. It was even taught in schools as just basic facts and science before it became political.
• scoot_718 6y ago
  "Exploit what people want"
• tdevito 6y ago
  >Can you imagine a better way to destroy social mobility than by telling poor kids that the way to get rich is by exploiting people, while the rich kids know, from having watched the preceding generation do it, how it's really done? I'm so glad someone finally said this, I wasn't sure if I was the only one with the same theory about inequality and it is articulated well here. It's "cultural inequality", inequality of cultural capital.
• Binichgross0 6y ago
  pgs pg
• drewrv 6y ago
  This essay uses a weak straw-man: the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people I think the "principle of charity" or "steel-man" criticism of billionaires isn't that every single billionaire is directly exploiting people. It would be closer to something like this: The problem is that our society has feedback loops that make it hard to escape poverty, and feedback loops that let the wealthy amass more wealth and power. It doesn't have to be this way, it's a product of our laws and can be changed. Warren Buffet doesn't directly exploit anyone. However he does pay less taxes than his secretary. To the extent that Uber drivers and Amazon warehouse workers are exploited, it's because our society has millions of desperate people struggling to get by. What's the point of being the wealthiest nation ever on paper, if there's terrible schools, high infant mortality, and lead in the drinking pipes?
  • WalterBright 6y ago
    > However he does pay less taxes than his secretary. His secretary can buy Berkshire Hathaway stock at any time and pay a lower tax rate than Buffet, while growing wealth at the same rate as Buffet.
  • TAForObvReasons 6y ago
    > Warren Buffet doesn't directly exploit anyone FWIW He has a significant stake in a company (Berkshire Hathaway) that does own a series of companies that engage in questionable practices. And he is uniquely in a position to stop that practice and chooses not to. https://publicintegrity.org/business/warren-buffetts-mobile-home-empire-preys-on-the-poor/ https://publicintegrity.org/business/warren-buffetts-mobile-...
  • throwaway09223 6y ago
    This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people posting exactly this sentiment. It is true that there are other, more reasonable beliefs.
    • dang 6y ago
      I don't disagree, but can you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
• PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  It seems there's not even an glimmer of an understanding of even basic Marxist analysis here. If you sell stuff or services to people, you have to pay for that stuff or services, unless you create them yourself out of thin air. If you pay some people for stuff or services and then resell them to other people, you could: * sell them for less than you paid * sell them for whatever you paid * sell them for more than you paid If you sell them for more than you paid, the question arises as to why anyone would pay you more when they could have paid someone else less. There are lots of possible answers: * you bought in bulk but will sell small * you did a bunch of work to make the stuff/services available * you did a bunch of work to find customers * you did a bunch of work transforming the inputs So, the question about exploitation really comes down to: do you make more profit than can be justified by whatever work that you personally put in? In the case of anyone who makes US$1B or more by selling stuff/services that other people produce, I think it's fairly clear most of the time that they have exploited those other people: that is, their profit (vastly) exceeds the value of the work they themselves did.
  • jacques_chester 6y ago
    In fairness, being a lisp programmer who got lucky during one of the frothiest acquisition markets of all time doesn't necessarily make one an economist, whether Marxist or otherwise.
• simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  > It's not growing yet, but maybe they can figure out how to make it grow during YC." Which they did, about three weeks into the batch. I wouldn't be too kind to the less-than-ethical techniques that AirBnB did use to capture the initial users. [0]. ... AirBnB also used a (admittedly suspect) email campaign to inform posters of vacation rentals on Craigslist how easy it was to post on AirBnB too. [0]: http://fullstack.it/blog/growth/airbnb-craigslist-growth-hack/ http://fullstack.it/blog/growth/airbnb-craigslist-growth-hac...
• pontifier 6y ago
  "And not just new, but uncertain. If it were certain that the need existed and that you could satisfy it, that certainty would be reflected in large and rapidly growing revenues, and you wouldn't be seeking seed funding." I take issue with this. I'm quite certain of the things I work on, but have not been able to execute due to lack of funds. This lack of execution means no revenue. No revenue means I'm struggling to fund things myself because I know how valuable the equity I'd have to give away would be worth. The best, and most confident founders aren't going to be in a rush to trade equity for ANYTHING, EVEN if the revenue isn't there yet.
• 2Xheadpalm 6y ago
  Those billionaire nerds may have been brilliant builders and may even started out with 'good' motivations but with their new found wealth and power, they are no longer the same people once they are inaugurated into the B. club. - 'Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely'.
• ppod 6y ago
  "Make something people want" is ambiguous in an interesting way. It could mean "Find out what people want, and make that" (Ford's faster horse), or it can mean "make something that people will want when they understand it".
• JangoSteve 6y ago
  It seems weird to view it as an either/or. "Billionaires exploit people." -- "No, they build things people want." I think that you may be able to become a billionaire without exploiting people, but it's like playing on the high-difficulty mode. In other words, it's easier to be "successful" (from a monetary point of view) when you don't care about others. It's also easier to be successful coming from a privileged background. What's more, there can be a correlation between only knowing privilege and not caring about others, which perhaps leads to the number of billionaires who exploit people (double-advantage). But it's all very complicated. Sometimes a modest background is an advantage in that you have less to lose, and can provide unique insight in connecting with people. Or a modest background can lead to a survival-of-the-fittest or harsh-world mentality, which leads to the exact opposite, which can also be an advantage. At any rate, I've chosen to play on high-difficulty mode, for better or worse.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• olefoo 6y ago
  Well, of course billionaires don't directly exploit people. They just build systems and take advantage of large scale features of the social environment that exploit people. It's a completely different morally. I mean, you can't hold airbnb responsible for either the housing crunch or any part of the homelessness crisis. They just created a system that allows landlords to cash in on high-return short term rentals. The negative externalities created by the mass adoption of their platform cannot be landed on their moral accounting. It's totally obvious.
• dluan 6y ago
  It's clear to me from pg's latest essays is that he is no longer living in the future. There's a generational divide that's growing between younger founders and how they see technology with the first golden generation of tech - the Apple, Microsoft, Web 1.0/2.0 type of inventors and business people. Because there is no way you can show this essay to a younger founder and not have it feel out of touch.
  • dang 6y ago
    What would a younger founder find out of touch about it? The founders I see in recent YC batches don't seem so different in this respect—but perhaps I'm out of touch with out-of-touchness.
    • nostrademons 6y ago
      There's a selection bias there: people who think YC or YC's startup model is out-of-touch don't apply to YC, and certainly don't get selected. Personally, I've watched YC grow from something that I thought was an obviously good idea but nobody else agreed with me about (I applied to the first SFP in 2005, as a college student), to something mainstream that lots of people aspired to (~2010), to being something at best ho-hum and at worst actively bad for the world (today). Getting rich is just not desirable anymore; technology is only desirable insofar as it helps solve pressing problems for the world as a whole. In 2010 I was the one who would go to parties and young people would be like "Oh, you work for Google, that's so cool!". In 2014, it was "Oh, you're founding a startup to fix unemployment, that's so cool!". Now when my wife (who works as a professional impact investor) goes to a party with young people, it's "Oh, you're solving climate change and funding reproductive healthcare and working for racial justice, that's so cool!" Meanwhile, I say "I work in software" neutrally and omit that it's for Google.
      • dang 6y ago
        That's a point about the general population, not founders, who form a pretty different (and pretty small) subset. The other thing I'd be cautious about here is that the curve you describe basically always happens. Shit was always cooler when it was newer and we were there before everyone else, etc.; people say this about everything. I'm not sure how to correct for this, but it's a strong skew.
• mcguire 6y ago
  [Yes, I, too, am going to focus on the billionaire part; I'm not going to be applying to YC for anything anytime soon. I don't need to know how to navigate their interviews.] I would like to make a minor note: the thing that politicians sometimes say is, "that the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people". Not "setting out to exploit people", not by trying to be Snidely Whiplash the professional mustache twirler. The statement is about effects, not intentions. Henry Ford started out building cars, not controlling people's lives. But that's kind of what he ended up doing (https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-police-ruled-his-wo-1549625731 https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-poli...). Andrew Carnegie wanted to make steel but also got the Homestead Strike (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike) (involving the Pinkerton Agency mentioned the other day). But look at some of the names mentioned in the article: * Apple started to make computers and related gear, and did so very successfully. On the other hand, it might be reasonable to see Steve Wozniak as exploited, not to mention the other early employees. And then there was that Foxconn thing.... * Mark Zuckerberg did indeed want to "engage online with his college friends". He did not start out wanting to dick around with democracy as we know it. * Larry and Sergey certainly wanted to search the Internet. But then they bought DoubleClick, one of the most loathed companies on said Internet, and turned it into one of the world's largest cash cows, primarily using their ability to collect information on everyone, everywhere. * AirBnB absolutely, positively did not set out to violate hospitality laws and do weird things to real estate worldwide. * Paul Graham, of course, got started by selling Viaweb for $49 million of Yahoo stock. Viaweb had 21 employees at that time (https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/09/business/company-news-yahoo-buying-viaweb-a-web-marketing-software-maker.html); https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/09/business/company-news-yah... anyone know how the other 18 people made out? And that leads me to YC itself, which gives money to start-ups in exchange for...something, and which helps introduce start-ups to other investors. Which has never, ever, in the history of the world resulted in exploitative relationships. (I'm being sarcastic. It's not hard to find companies whose founders have been forced out by investors, much less other kinds of interference.) Which is why Paul's argument about billionaires is a strawman. I firmly believe him when he writes, "[Working because there's nothing else they'd rather do], not exploiting people, is the defining quality of people who become billionaires from starting companies." And I believe that "Y Combinator certainly sees founders whose m.o. is to exploit people." They exist, and I believe YC rejects them. But none of that has anything to do with the path from there to billionaire-hood. There is a billion decisions between founding and billionaire-osity, and some of them, historically, involve stepping on someone. Because Paul doesn't seem to want to acknowledge that, I get worried when he writes about "I think they start from the feeling that it's wrong that one person could have so much more money than another. It's understandable where that feeling comes from. ... The mistake they make is to jump from feeling bad that some people are much richer than others to the conclusion that there's no legitimate way to make a very large amount of money." Money is power, but I suspect Paul would be less happy (publicly) making that statement with the substitution. (And of course there's legitimate ways to make large amounts of money; the powerful define what is legitimate.) This is getting too long, so I'll just end it with some snark: Here is a very American statement: "There are certainly some people who become rich by doing bad things. But there are also plenty of people who behave badly and don't make that much from it. There is no correlation — in fact, probably an inverse correlation — between how badly you behave and how much money you make." Yes, right up there with "I'm a temporarily distressed billionaire myself": money is correlated with morality. "Can you imagine a better way to destroy social mobility than by telling poor kids that the way to get rich is by exploiting people, while the rich kids know, from having watched the preceding generation do it, how it's really done?" -- I'd imagine poor kids already know about exploiting people. They just don't have the contacts to do it correctly.
• kevas 6y ago
  About to write some possibly controversial stuff... My early life, I grew up and had middle to upper middle class all around me. In my late teens and early twenties, there were times I had to scrounge my cushions and rummage through my car to find enough change to eat a meal. We live in a society where everyone has access to a computer—personal or local library. We have all the information we need to bring (the majority, but not all) ourselves up from poverty to lower middle class or even middle class. It’s my belief that it boils down to a few things: - self learning - dedication Self Learning: if you must, pirate the crap out of all knowledge you need to get your family in a stable place. You need a textbook, you can find an older version; need a research report, find it online; you need.... just go find it and get it. If you don’t know how to find it, learn how to find it. If you don’t know where to start, ask someone. Just do... Dedication: it’s so much easier to just come home do what you need to do with the family and then sit down and watch tv or do something that’s not going to progress you. It’s not fun and your mind will fight you every step of the way, but what’s more important to you? The show that’s on in an hour or the stability of your mind and family? Don’t look for those immediate returns, yet rather look for those returns that pay off in a year or two or 5. As i said, it sucks, but what’s more important? One thing I’ve noticed over and over again is the difference between being raised in middle class or upper middle class vs poverty is the view of the work place—I’m not saying this is true for everyone, but just what I’ve observed over time. - Middle class and up: not as scared to talk back, speak your mind, or challenge their opinion to your bosses or colleagues. - Poverty: fearful of doing the aforementioned I, for some reason see this as one of the largest issues with advancement as it propagates to not just the work life, but also the personal life too and thus creates a fear of challenge—it’s better to go with the status quo than to break out. How can this change? Learn learn learn and then go find a place where you can apply your new skills and then just keep learning instead of doing the easy thing... Thoughts?
  • analognoise 6y ago
    You're essentially saying "pull yourself up by your bootstraps". This is very easy to do if you've experienced a middle or upper middle class upbringing. This is almost impossible to do if you were raised in a household of abuse or food scarcity, or where your network doesn't contain any well educated individuals. Basically it works for...middle class people. In short: trickle down economics is being pissed on and calling it rain, and "just work harder" blames people for their station and expects them to be extraordinary just to have a reasonable life. It's essentially blaming the poor, the easiest way out possible, with nice gloss on top, and it's total and utter bullshit that papers over the systemic forces acting against all workers - let alone those just scraping by.
• Barrin92 6y ago
  Two things that are very obviously wrong with the take, both I think having the same reason: Not all billionaires are self-made, and a majority of them aren't tech entrepreneurs of the sort PG talks about in this piece. Seems like a very obvious fact but somehow doesn't really come up. Secondly, in the same vein, the kind of (aspiring) billionaires YC meets are, by definition, builders, because they're self-sorted fledging entrepreneurs. Paul somehow uses this as an argument when he should notice that this means he has a bias. Nobody called Zuckerberg or Bezos exploitative when they were coding in dorm rooms and folding boxes on Ikea tables, and that's the kind of people Paul thinks off when he thinks of billionaires in his job. But that's a different story from the conglomerates they run 20 year later when the majority of their employees are warehouse workers and content moderators with mental issues Reason for not recognizing this is obviously that PG mistakes Silicon valley startup culture for the entire world, which I wouldn't have blamed him for 20 years ago, but what is odd is that it seems to have gotten worse even though he moved away from it.
  • anon9001 6y ago
    > Nobody called Zuckerberg or Bezos exploitative when they were coding in dorm rooms and folding boxes on Ikea tables Actually lots of us called them exploitive. It might not change anything, but it's worth noting that a lot of us knew that facebook would grow into the great evil that it is today. It was also obvious that Amazon would eat all retail stores, and it pretty much has.
    • jessaustin 6y ago
      I thought Amazon was sort of magic in a scary way twenty years ago, but as you say, lots of people had a similar impression. What's interesting are the people who don't see the threat even today.
      • seibelj 6y ago
        What is the threat? No one makes me use any of their services or buy any of their products. But I have and will continue to do so because Amazon is so obviously superior to the competition. Recently I have begun ordering from Walmart. Why? They have upped their ecommerce game. Just as Sears was once dominant and even sold houses via catalog, and no one in 1930 could have imagined Sears going bust, no one in 2020 can imagine Amazon losing its dominance. But Sears collapses, IBM fades, and the world moves on. In 2020 I’m happy Amazon exists, proud America allowed it to grow, and don’t feel ill-will towards people who voluntarily agree to work for them.
• paradox242 6y ago
  Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the history of the universe (in absolute number) by founding a company that made life a lot more convenient for a lot of people and there is value in that. We have also all read the stories about how Amazon relates to their labor force, in particular their blue collar workers, upon whom they depend for their business to succeed. Everyone has different attitudes about wealth and poverty largely relating to the class they grew up in and the one they now find themselves in (historically almost always one and the same) but the question that pg sidesteps here entirely is whether it is moral for a single individual to accumulate this kind of wealth. It's clear one can, but should they ought to? Should it be something to be ashamed of, not lauded and aspired to? I would say yes, and I think many (perhaps not here, given the type of person who frequents this board) would agree. They would observe that while Jeff had some ideas and provided some direction, that the vast majority of the work was done by others far more talented than he in their specific role. That he happens to live in a society that routinely grants the spoils disproportionately to the organizers and not those performing the actual labor is the central critique of capitalism highlighted by Marx and to which I think pg is actually alluding, even if he doesn't realize it. This "profit" is not a surplus, and the difference between the price charged for a commodity or service and that paid in labor (less any costs in materials) is seen as inherently exploitative. I think people can reasonably disagree about the degree, there is of course value in the organization of labor and materials to provide a product or service, but wage disparities of 100 times? 1000 times? I find this to be indefensible.
• dang 6y ago
  (I originally posted this as a reply to a different comment but detached it because I don't want to pick on anyone personally, or appear to.) I think what underlies the outrage in this and similar threads is simple: people expect everything anybody says about "billionaires" to be bad. If someone breaks the rule, it doesn't matter what they say; the response will be just this outrage. And if they're a billionaire themselves (or classified by the audience thereas), woe betide. This is not complex conversation—it's ritual behavior. I'm not arguing against wealth redistribution, siding with billionaires, lacking empathy for what people are living through, or anything of the sort—quite the contrary. I'm just observing that the conversation manifesting in threads like this has a distinctive quality: it is basically our version of feces-hurling in primates, and I'm curious about how weird that is and how weird it is that its weirdness goes unnoticed.
  • existencebox 6y ago
    I actually don't think it's particularly weird. I would cite various research on studies investigating "fairness" [0] (Citing this one re: corvids since I need to get back to work and this was a quick google, but it chain-cites papers in primates, dogs, humans, found what appears to be a meta-study here [1] as well) Namely, that individuals will decline to participate in exchanges where they would benefit, if another individual would benefit inequitably. I think you sell short the systemic advantages by framing it as "Feces-hurling"; namely that it may serve as an important societal and evolutionary pressure, for instance, as [1] suggests improved social cooperation. Some of the comments on this thread even touch on this, although I'd frame it a bit differently, with comments such as "many people find the existence of a billionaire implicitly unfair." Namely, judgements of morality, economics, society aside, one has to be rather stoic to feel _no_ envy when comparing ones own lot to the life and resources being a billionaire enables, so that it would trigger a "lizard brain" instinct seems entirely natural. (and again, similar to you, trying to keep this argument-free WRT the contention around that and making a meta-observation, one may disagree as to how justified or sensitive one should be to this feeling, I'm just pointing out "I can understand it on a very pragmatic level.") We may be agreeing loudly here, my response is primarily to addressing your stated surprise, as well as try and paint the cause and effect in a more... detached? perspective, to better contemplate its nature and incentives. [0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0056885 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4451566/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4451566/
• shawndrost 6y ago
  This essay shows a contradiction in PG's own beliefs, which I also grapple with. He doesn't believe "the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people", and his argument is persuasive. I tend to agree! All those characteristics he's interviewing for are positive, and I think he's a great billionaire scout. Most of the rich people I know got there in ways that don't seem exploitative. But, he does believe "people who make a lot of money have a moral obligation to use it for the common good", and... isn't that a contradiction? If someone makes their first ten million, and keeps earning more with no clear plans to allocate it to the public good -- are they ignoring their moral obligation? Maybe not yet. What about a multi-billionaire who, years down the road, still hasn't signed on to something like the Giving Pledge? How can we defend the morality of that person?
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• gorpomon 6y ago
  No doubt most successful startups are built by selling useful things, not exploiting people, but as they grow and encounter new problems the exploitation happens. You don't _become_ a billionaire by exploitation, but it sure does help you _keep on_ being a billionaire. Facebook, Amazon, Apple and others didn't start out exploiting people, but they sure as hell do exploit at at least some group of people now. Content moderators, warehouse workers, assembly line workers. It's not a neat and clean picture, a lot of those people would themselves say it's a job they decide to do-- and their agency shouldn't be diminished-- but the exploitation does exist and it is real. You at some point just have to listen to people, and enough people in this country are saying its systems are exploiting them. Simply put: It would be nice to see Paul write an essay about how Facebook should treat their contracted content moderators better, rather than expend his mental energy retorting to a few progressive politicians. I too wish that those politicians understood tech a bit more, but there's lots of people who I wish understood lots of things better. This essay is mostly quite wise and thought-provoking, too bad his grievances color it.
  • heurist 6y ago
    Being useful to one group (in the process of becoming a billionaire) can be exploitative to another group.
• shirakawasuna 6y ago
  Seems like awfully political content to me
• jstgord 6y ago
  no. A better first-order approximation to reality, is "Billionaires Exploit". A second order approximation is that Billionaires exploit a) the political system by funding politicians indirectly so they will implement policies that enhance profits, b) poor employees by paying them a wage they cannot live on without government subsidies while keeping them in precarious arrangements to avoid union benefits and c) natural resources by avoiding costs which should be inherent [ eg. defer cost of redressing carbon pollution and recycling ]. Paul meets the best kind of proto-billionaire - innovators who aspire to _make_ something useful, or at least something that people want - and perhaps doesn't get to interview the appalling idle-rich dynasty billionaires who inherit obscene wealth, and cannot spend money faster than it grows. We should not be congratulating Gates on investing money in Vaccines - we should have taxed him properly and used that money to fund vaccines/healthcare and climate initiatives. Then perhaps the 15 copies of windows 'tax' - which I paid for but never used because I installed linux - would be distributed democratically. Look around.. what part of the world is not on fire ? Startups are not the solution to our current evils. I would suggest that we have abandoned the fair rules that governed our economy, and our democracies, weakening our systems and institutions - and this has put us in peril. Covid is merely a kick-the-tyres test before the real game of climate change, and we have failed that test. The pandemic has exposed dire systemic weaknesses. If one 9/11 per day of aunties dying is not enough to wake us up, will the permanent melting of the ice caps even be noticed ? Printing digital cash to prop up stock prices is a great way to get us through a pandemic induced economic shock, but we need to learn from this quickly, and rebuild our institutions - a free market works only if people can trust that the rules of the market are fair. We must rapidly align the engine of enterprise to our global survival : tax the uber-rich brutally, spend it wisely in the war on climate change.
• arderary 6y ago
  This seems in fairly bad faith. As best I can tell, it suggests that the argument that billionaires exploit people is unfounded, because they delight _users_? I mean, sure, but that says _nothing_ about exploitation. A company that exploits its users won't generally do well, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exploit its workers, which is generally what politicians mean here (see Amazon, for instance. Or, since Facebook was brought up in the article, their content moderation team)
• elihu 6y ago
  > But aptitude for exploiting people is not what Y Combinator looks for at all. In fact, it's the opposite of what they look for. I'll tell you what they do look for, by explaining how to convince Y Combinator to fund you, and you can see for yourself. > > What YC looks for, above all, is founders who understand some group of users and can make what they want. This is so important that it's YC's motto: "Make something people want." These things aren't necessarily as contradictory as they may seem on the surface. The full life cycle of many successful tech startups is to make something people want, attract a large user base, have an IPO and become billionaires, and then (when it comes time to generate the revenue that the investors were expecting when they invested in the first place) throw the users under the bus in favor of the real customers, whoever they are. Often marketers. The early phase, where the company is simply providing users with the best product they can make and seems to be making the world a better place is often a mirage that disappears as soon as they switch to a revenue-maximization mode of existence. I don't think it has to be this way; probably plenty of people have become billionaires and treated their customers well at the same time. It's just a common thread with many of the very high-profile tech company "successes". Paul Graham deals with founders at the very beginning of their endeavors when idealism is high and strongly correlated with success. At that time it isn't exactly clear where their companies will be in twenty or thirty years.
• DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I think the point that billionaires build is a reasonable one. There are basically two ways to make money: Create something of value and somehow keep some portion of that value or extract value. Extracting value sort of works to some degree in some situations, such as mining (at least until you have ruined the environment and your unsustainable practices are coming back to bite you). But whether you are a "self made billionaire" or inherited it, you have to fundamentally be a good steward of value to at least some degree or things soon look like the dystopian outcome in the movie The Lion King after the hyenas ally with the bad guy lion. Billionaires can only exist as long as billionaires create more pie than they keep -- though certainly it is reasonable to be concerned about exactly where that dividing line should be such that their customers/users/whatever phrase you desire to use here get sufficient value that they don't feel taken advantage of and screwed over. It gets easy for wealthy people to demand more without really intending to be assholes and get it because they haven't really figured out that the aggressive tactics that worked to make them rich are no longer appropriate now that they are rich because of the power differential that was created in the course of getting wealthy (money being rooted in power, not the other way around). If you want "evidence" that billionaires fundamentally must provide some degree of real value, I am happy to point you to Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. Theranos was valued at $10 Billion and went to zero valuation overnight after it was discovered the entire thing was a con job.
  • confidantlake 6y ago
    >If you want "evidence" that billionaires fundamentally must provide some degree of real value... Counterexample, the children of billionaires provide no degree of real value.
• Tiktaalik 6y ago
  "Make something people want" (+ "share as little of the spoils as possible")
• jacknews 6y ago
  PG confuses 'bad people' with a bad system. I don't think Zuckerberg, or Bezos are necessarily bad people, but they are the beneficiaries of a bad system, which squeezes work and wealth from poorer people and sucks it to the top.
  • sumedh 6y ago
    > I don't think Zuckerberg, or Bezos are necessarily bad people Some of Amazon's warehouse employees have to pee in bottles to save time. You dont think that is bad and Bezos should do something to stop that?
  • johnsimer 6y ago
    Zuck from the beginning has lied to people and made bad faith apologies. Repeatedly
• abvdasker 6y ago
  More absolute garbage from latter-day Paul Graham which further confirms how profoundly out of touch he is with the current political discourse around wealth and inequality. He demonstrates a baffling level of ignorance concerning the actual criticisms at play. > The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there's nothing else they'd rather do. Here he completely misses the point, which is that exploitation has very little to do with an individual's intention and everything to do with systemic dynamics and incentives in the way these companies operate. It was probably not Travis Kalanick's intention to exploit drivers, but Uber's business model incentivizes the company to pay drivers as little as possible, which they do. A similar dynamic plays out with nearly all capitalist enterprise, which makes the intentions of founders mostly irrelevant. "Their exploitation usually begins with their own cofounders, which is disastrous, since the cofounders' relationship is the foundation of the company. Then it moves on to the user..." At no point in this entire post does PG address what "exploitation" really means in the Marxist sense — Marxist economics being at the heart of most of discussions about wealth accumulation — which focuses on the exploitation of labor and the ways in which technology can enable or accelerate capital accumulation to the detriment of regular workers. What's so startling about PG's posts on these subjects is how unseriously he takes the opposing view. He clearly hasn't done any work to understand people's concerns about income and wealth inequality (which is not just coming from "politicians" as he characterizes it). There are probably better arguments in favor of billionaires, but Graham doesn't know enough about the ideas he's arguing against to imagine them. If this is the level of intellectual rigor governing Silicon Valley today, it's no wonder we keep seeing boondoggles like WeWork and Theranos propped up by silly investments. Disgraceful.
• spacekitcat 6y ago
  Whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.
• unityByFreedom 6y ago
  Some billionaires shoulder others out of the way by censoring forums that might criticize them.
• siliconc0w 6y ago
  So a lot of today's billionaires are solidly rooted in historical imperialism and the pillaging of people and nations (i.e old money). Maybe not new YC startup-billionaires but they tend to get their capital from the former. Also they tend to get a lot more compensation for their time/effort than most employees - even early ones that took similar risks and worked just as hard due to lopsided startup equity and the games played with it. Also there are entire classes of billionaires that got there through leveraging negative impacts to society they didn't have to pay for, government collusion, monopolies or other unfair business practices, or regulatory capture (due to regulations they got through bribed politicians) to think of a few.
• temptemptemp111 6y ago
  I'm highly amused that he is unable to realize that "making what people want" can easily equal exploitation in a majority of cases.
• dataisfun 6y ago
  I find it hard to read anything by Paul Graham these days without an allergic reaction to its hubris.
• cancelpaulg 6y ago
  When the food riots start, Paul's piles of gold won't save him. We're completely fucked as a species, and SV VCs are totally out of touch. Off with their heads.
• rrivers 6y ago
  Article also misses the additional aspect is that being a billionaire isn't just about the digits representing your fiat energy. It gives very small groups of individuals large swaths of control in entire verticals of society. A small group of unelected kings directing the energy, housing, food supplies, distribution, town square (etc.), needs of the rest. It's a poor way of organizing a functioning and well integrated society. One that is only maintained by the continued purchasing of political power. It's an anti-democratic system where the primary distribution of power is determined by birth lottery. We're in an era of our species and collective intelligence where we can imagine much better ways than this, but for many with that power their primary objective is keeping it.
• jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  [..] What YC looks for, above all, is founders who understand some group of users and can make what they want. This is so important that it's YC's motto: "Make something people want."[..] And what people want is ways and means to satisfy one of the ‘seven sins’ : “Pride. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth.” Facebook satisfies all the seven urges to sin.
  • greenyouse 6y ago
    Alan Kay had an interesting talk about designing for the future. One part was on building a company to appeal to basic instincts vs creating tools and systems to benefit people. https://youtu.be/1e8VZlPBx_0?t=2814 https://youtu.be/1e8VZlPBx_0?t=2814 There are universal human traits that have negative impacts on people over the long-term but are craved during the short-term. These are like legal drugs. If you can use a few of these traits and tie them to an addictive feedback loop, then you probably have a product that's successful (and totally evil). It's concerning that some of the bestselling books in the startup bubble are about how to create these addictions in people. It would be nice if there were more tools and systems companies for helping humanity grow. I guess most modern day big companies are like a mix of the two. For every major social network there are usually some awesome engineering tools that get open sourced. It's harder to create a tools only or systems only kind of company but they're definitely nice since they expand the way we all think.
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• throwaway7281 6y ago
  Just sampling: The last billionaire I looked up was a north american mining guy. He owns mines, in Africa. Can you guess which country? Yes exactly, the one that prospers much more than the others. Basically, the "work" has to come from somewhere. The reason FB is rich is because 2+B people choose to work for free. The reason Google is rich is because they do not have to create the content (in fact, "content creators" are pushed to the back seat). The reason Amazon is rich is because you can use cheap labor and sprinkle tech-efficiency on it. The reason all gig-companies are rich is because they can circumvent many "worker-rights". The reason Microsoft is rich is because they give a damn about compatibility and competition (the will extinguish probably even the classic "open source", given enough time). Some hedge funds are rich, because they buy the order-flow data of poor people playing with their money - maybe they use it against them, maybe not. I cannot see non-exploitation in any of these. Another grandiosely self-serving essay by a rich man, who thinks he has figured out how the world works. If he really had, he would probably want to change it. For the better - which is probably much harder then just doing more of the same. Edit: I sometimes think people who write these things are painfully aware of the kind of illusion they create and choose to create it nevertheless. Mundus vult decipi.
  • smabie 6y ago
    First of all, most market making firms that buy order flow are not hedge funds, they are proprietary trading firms. They trade their own capital, not their investors' capital. Second of all, payment for order flow is massively beneficial for retail investors. If you look at the price improvements being offered, the zero commission, and the tight spreads being quoted, the vast majority of retail investors are benefiting greatly from this arrangement. If however you are trading large lots (hundreds of thousands of dollars worth), then the marking makers start to become somewhat more menacing.
  • frakkingcylons 6y ago
    > Some hedge funds are rich, because they buy the order-flow data of poor people playing with their money Hedge funds do not pay retail brokerages for order flow. The vast majority of trading activity from retail investors is motivated by public information, so it offers basically no insight worth paying for. This is the exact reason why market makers do pay for order flow. They can safely execute a huge number of these trades with very little risk and collectively make a hefty profit from the small spread.
• arentyouspecial 6y ago
  That’s a hot take, as if a boss/billionaire has never exploited the power differential to have their employees to work weekends or holidays to get a product shipped.
• known 6y ago
  How to measure social mobility? https://archive.is/YIjwk https://archive.is/YIjwk
• ashneo76 6y ago
  Every single day that goes by, a billionaire does absolutely nothing with his extra billions. No looks shedding of 1-2 billions dollars. Instead there is a measly donation of 100000k here or there. Billionaires are keeping the society this way.
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• AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  Somewhat of a meta point - but it seems like AirBnB the go-to example that PG uses in his essays (even if he mentions others - like Boom in this case). AirBnB is of course a total homerun, but surely there are other companies like Stripe, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Gitlab etc... that have equivalently good reference points for how founders should think. I'm curious if there is something that sets the ABNB folks that much apart in that sense.
  • elefanten 6y ago
    Could be because they're about to IPO. Though same is true of DoorDash, and GitLab probably not too far behind.
• shallowthought 6y ago
  Good to know Paul Graham is still writing poorly thought-out articles. That guy's Lisp code must be a nightmare.
• originalvichy 6y ago
  I was expecting actual debunking but it just turned into a weird tangent. The reality is that extracting surplus value from the labor of others and keeping it can and is validly seen as exploitation. We have just normalized it. In capitalist businesses the owners of the business get to keep the surplus value guilt-free and they are not obligated to divide the money to laborers. Laborers arent always in a balanced relationship with businesses so they can’t gain any of that money back without some form of unionization. This is something I woulda liked to read but I felt it took a weird direction.
• anonytrary 6y ago
  Exploiting value is not the same as creating value. By building things that you need yourself, you are creating value.
• poxwole 6y ago
  That's the best joke I have heard. Billionaires build nothing. Most research is done by Public funding and then sold to privateers for pennies
• pvorb 6y ago
  Well, you cannot become a billionaire by just working hard. A billionaire might have had an idea at the right time. For YC startups, the money comes from somebody else. Does having an idea justify to earn 100,000x the amount of somebody else who's working 60 hours a week to keep their family from hunger? Comparing extremes here, I know. I accept the fact that the market and law allow for this to happen, but I don't have to respect billionaires for it.
• known 6y ago
  Bitter truth by PG :) Indian IT industry is an exemplar; TCS/Infosys/Wipro/HCL make money by selling software engineers, not software to clients in US/EU; https://archive.vn/ecCtN https://archive.vn/ecCtN Rishi Sunak's wife is richer than the Queen They're running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme with tacit support from Law makers :(
• kraf 6y ago
  What a naive point to make. As if what people want is in some way inherently good and righteous. I might believe something like this when talking about millionaires but people accruing thousands of millions do so by exploitation at the very least more often than not.
• yuhong 6y ago
  I am still focusing on Google, in this case the only reason it can IPO is ad revenue.
• praestigiare 6y ago
  I know the politicians are mistaken because it was my job to predict which people will become billionaires. This does not follow. You could just as easily argue that this means you are bad at predicting billionaires. YC is 8 for 1000 in the billionaire prediction game. Maybe that is good enough to claim expertise, but I think you have to actually make that argument and not assume it. If the key to becoming a billionaire — the defining feature of billionaires — was to exploit people, then I, as a professional billionaire scout, would surely realize this. This does not follow. First, "if this was true, I would know" is not an argument. Second, if exploitation is necessary, but not sufficient, it might be essentially useless as a predictor while still being universal among billionaires.
• overton 6y ago
  He's right that exploitation isn't what distinguishes billionaires from other capitalists. There are many unsuccessful/less successful capitalists who nonetheless still exploit people. But it's impossible to become a billionaire without exploiting people at a grand scale. And by exploitation, I mean something very simple: paying workers less than the value of their labour. Without exploitation there is no incentive for capitalists (within a capitalist system) to hire people. Since capitalists (billionaires and non-billionaires) still hire people, it's clear that exploitation is endemic to the capitalist system, and is required to become a billionaire.
• birdyrooster 6y ago
  Paul Graham must not be aware of how AirBnb causes greater homelessness https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/05/airbnb-homelessness-renting-housing-accommodation-social-policy-cities-travel-leisure https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/05/airbnb-ho...
• telltruth 6y ago
  One thing that troubles me while reading this essay is so much focus on being billionaire as the goal to carry out the building activities. A huge problem with this is too many hackers now building in order to exploit human weakness of getting continuous dopamine hits. There are good examples of building utilities like AirBnB and Dropbox but then there is TikTok, Kik and other monsters.
• cayblood 6y ago
  "That, not exploiting people, is the defining quality of people who become billionaires from starting companies." This is one of the sentences in the essay that most reveals Graham's reductionism. A person can become a billionaire without any desire to exploit someone and still the conditions resulting from the success of their organization can, and often do, result in exploitation. Even a brief study of organizational behavior reveals that all organizations do damage, some more than others. We don't need to keep defending organizations. They can handle their own defense. Individuals, on the other hand, are far more vulnerable.