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He starts his entire essay with a faulty premise, that in order to be a billionaire you have to be exploitative, and then goes on to argue why Y Combinator does

He starts his entire essay with a faulty premise, that in order to be a billionaire you have to be exploitative, and then goes on to argue why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true. Look, not even 'prole defenders' agree with this. You don't have to be exploitative to be a billionaire, it's simply a byproduct. There are only several thousand billionaires on earth and you'd be hard pressed to find any one of them without some sort of scandal involving their workers or consumers. Pinpointing what is 'objectively' wrong with a subjective essay is hard, which is why most people are attacking the subjectivity itself, and I think that's healthy to do.

troughway 6y ago
People have already minced words over "exploitation" and where to exactly draw the boundary between acceptable/tolerable and not. It strikes me personally as flimsy reasoning to harp on his writings. If you're going to build a business and you hope to make money, you're going to have to EXPLOIT inefficiencies in markets, competitors, customers, processes, conventional modes of thinking, and so on. Doesn't matter if the business is making you a dollar or a million or a billion. And also, this whole "scandal involving workers or consumers". YC's portfolio has plenty of companies who are making a killing with revenue who haven't had to do this. Patrick Collison is a regular poster on here. Go ahead and tell him he's exploiting people and he's scandalous with workers and consumers. I'd like to see someone go to one of the successful YC alumni and say directly at them half the shit you people spout out into the nether. As I have mentioned in a comment to the throwaway account in this thread - I sincerely think a lot of commenters on here either have no experience or no ambition in starting a business, never mind getting a healthy revenue stream. Hell, I wonder what the percentage here is who got as far to having to talk to clients.
treis 6y ago
>why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true. I have a dim recollection of an article many years ago that Y Combinator asked applicants a time when they gamed the system and the answer to that was on of the most correlated to success. Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet. They framed it as a positive. Finding opportunities and using them to your advantage. But a negative framing would be that they were looking for people that exploited whatever advantage they oculd find.
- ac2u 6y ago
  >Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet. Are you sure you didn't just come up with that example yourself to suit the narrative? Until you know what all selected companies chose as an answer for that, aren't we just guessing as to what quality they were looking for? To be clear, I'm not accusing you of making it up, as my memory of it is dim too, I just can't remember examples being given like lying on a resume.
  - treis 6y ago
    What examples can you remember?
    - ac2u 6y ago
      I think this was the thread I remember reading at the time where people came up with examples that don't have to be deceptive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197674 There was also a quote from someone in yc saying that the question wasn't really that important (probably why it got removed).
      - treis 6y ago
        I'm glad you found it, but I don't really see those as really changing my point. They looked for people that beat the system. They're amusing anecdotes when it's a plucky college kid hustling for a job. But when it's a head of a billion+ company beating the system (i.e. laws protecting workers and/or the general populace) it's a different story.
      - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
        That’s an interesting thread ..altho not enough comments to make it super interesting.. I guess ‘hacks’ are what we call as ‘loopholes’ in tax audits. This is how I understand hacking. Every system has its strength/weaknesses and boundaries. As long as we can rearrange the system from within the boundaries by exploiting the available strengths/weaknesses to create an entirely different model/system/agenda qualifies as a ‘hack’.

troughway 6y ago

People have already minced words over "exploitation" and where to exactly draw the boundary between acceptable/tolerable and not. It strikes me personally as flimsy reasoning to harp on his writings. If you're going to build a business and you hope to make money, you're going to have to EXPLOIT inefficiencies in markets, competitors, customers, processes, conventional modes of thinking, and so on. Doesn't matter if the business is making you a dollar or a million or a billion. And also, this whole "scandal involving workers or consumers". YC's portfolio has plenty of companies who are making a killing with revenue who haven't had to do this. Patrick Collison is a regular poster on here. Go ahead and tell him he's exploiting people and he's scandalous with workers and consumers. I'd like to see someone go to one of the successful YC alumni and say directly at them half the shit you people spout out into the nether. As I have mentioned in a comment to the throwaway account in this thread - I sincerely think a lot of commenters on here either have no experience or no ambition in starting a business, never mind getting a healthy revenue stream. Hell, I wonder what the percentage here is who got as far to having to talk to clients.

treis 6y ago

>why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true. I have a dim recollection of an article many years ago that Y Combinator asked applicants a time when they gamed the system and the answer to that was on of the most correlated to success. Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet. They framed it as a positive. Finding opportunities and using them to your advantage. But a negative framing would be that they were looking for people that exploited whatever advantage they oculd find.

ac2u 6y ago
>Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet. Are you sure you didn't just come up with that example yourself to suit the narrative? Until you know what all selected companies chose as an answer for that, aren't we just guessing as to what quality they were looking for? To be clear, I'm not accusing you of making it up, as my memory of it is dim too, I just can't remember examples being given like lying on a resume.
- treis 6y ago
  What examples can you remember?
  - ac2u 6y ago
    I think this was the thread I remember reading at the time where people came up with examples that don't have to be deceptive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197674 There was also a quote from someone in yc saying that the question wasn't really that important (probably why it got removed).
    - treis 6y ago
      I'm glad you found it, but I don't really see those as really changing my point. They looked for people that beat the system. They're amusing anecdotes when it's a plucky college kid hustling for a job. But when it's a head of a billion+ company beating the system (i.e. laws protecting workers and/or the general populace) it's a different story.
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      That’s an interesting thread ..altho not enough comments to make it super interesting.. I guess ‘hacks’ are what we call as ‘loopholes’ in tax audits. This is how I understand hacking. Every system has its strength/weaknesses and boundaries. As long as we can rearrange the system from within the boundaries by exploiting the available strengths/weaknesses to create an entirely different model/system/agenda qualifies as a ‘hack’.