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I think it might be time to turn back the clock a bit and revisit some of the things pg said way back when he was pitching Sam Altman to lead YC and the general

I think it might be time to turn back the clock a bit and revisit some of the things pg said way back when he was pitching Sam Altman to lead YC and the general reaction was "...who?" 2008: "You could parachute [Sam Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you." https://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html https://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html 2014: "Of all the people we’ve met in the 9 years we’ve been working on YC, Jessica and I both feel Sam is the best suited for that task. He’s one of those rare people who manage to be both fearsomely effective and yet fundamentally benevolent..." https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-president https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-president Now, this isn't about pg specifically. Maybe he had reservations at the time but still thought he was making the right decision, maybe he's since changed his mind, maybe he hasn't but has pretty well moved on from this scene. Not interesting. I'm more interested in whether Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders, are finally becoming obvious enough now that people might finally begin to see them as the yucky byproducts of a yucky system. Maybe a moralistic, basically decent person couldn't get ChatGPT launched and turned in to the household topic of discussion it is today; maybe nice people can't build cheap rockets. Maybe in the future, when making an endorsement for a leadership position in some company, someone might be brazen enough to say aloud, "I believe this person is sufficiently nasty to make us all more successful." And so then the question is, does society net benefit more from the moralists or more from the capitalists? Do we accept that Sam Altmans are necessary for cool technology? How many Altmans can we have before something goes horribly, irreversibly wrong?

ryukoposting 2y ago
> Do we accept that Sam Altmans are necessary for cool technology? Zooming out a bit, do we accept "cool technology" as a virtue? Should it factor into my evaluation of a person at all?
- margalabargala 2y ago
  "Cool technology" here means things like dishwashers, or MRI machines, which pretty much strictly improve people's lives, not slightly better advertisement algorithms.
  - bergen 2y ago
    Pretty sure Paul Lauterbur was no douchebag and good products and inventions can come from good people.
  - garte 2y ago
    I don't think you need to be an asshole to invent a dishwasher or an MRI machine. The usefulness alone lets you sell these. AI on the other hand...
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Plenty of people are finding AI to be useful. I don't know what you're hinting at.
    - thefounder 2y ago
      Invention is one thing, a product to sell is almost an entirely different thing. The more I see the more I realise that being technical is almost all the time the least important part. You need to get people around you to succeed. In practice that means investors so that you can hire and people with the right connections so you can get sweet deals. You need people skills not inventions. And a bit more fake it until you make it rather than correct/technical information.
      - tarsinge 2y ago
        That's only the VC angle. Plenty of revolutionary products will find adoption without playing the SV startup playbook. I think it's time to reevaluate the startup business "wisdom" of these past 15 years in the light of the companies and founders "role models" it has produced over that time frame. Good at making money, obviously. Holding the promise of making society better? I'll let you judge. As for me since I've read from Zero to One I have a sense I have been duped. I was once grateful for HN for opening my eyes on marketing. Now I'm hangover at how it perverted everything.
benreesman 2y ago
I’m no huge fan of the bond villains in general, but this thread isn’t about Musk or whoever being a dick. And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work. Mark at a minimum is the Corp Dev CEO of a generation and I’d argue more. I’d argue he is the first person to create an accurate-ish mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a high-fidelity digital analogy. Bezos was at DE Shaw and called the Internet as a vehicle for commerce on the early side, to put it mildly. Ellison saw that what we now call RDBMS was going to Be Big and substantially implemented the early versions personally. Now this isn’t a license for any of the icky shit any of these folks have done since, but all of them put some of the points their character class rolled into “actually build something”. Altman put all his points into manipulate if not blackmail people around me until the machine coughs up the next stair on the ladder. I’m generally in favor of “less bond villains”, but that’s not the topic of the thread and neatly bypasses another key point which is that all the other bond villains you mentioned (and I’ve met a few of them) have some redeeming quality as opposed to, Jesus, could a fucking Kennedy get away with a farce like this? Stop changing the subject. I know all those essays by heart. I was synthesizing them with inside YC baseball the day they were published.
- thaumaturgy 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - benreesman 2y ago
    I don’t think that studying the history of the technology business makes one a tabloid journalist. I apologize if my remark came off smartass, I can see how it could. If you feel I could be more constructive I’m legitimately (no sarcasm whatsoever) open to suggestions: it’s a tricky topic and I strike the wrong note more often than the right one. Certainly I intended no personal offense to someone I haven’t met.
- bergen 2y ago
  No Musk builds nothing. There is a huge team he leads, consisting of engineers and scientists and they develop technology that Musk then sells. He's a glorified cars salesman. Maybe he was essential to get the rockets built, but neither did he build them, nor contribute essential technical details, so that it would be uniquely him who could do it given same financial backing.
WalterBright 2y ago
> amoral wealth-hoarders They're not hoarding wealth. They don't have any Scrooge McDuck cash faults. Their money is all invested, i.e. put to work creating things that people want. > moralists ... capitalists History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets). Like it or not, for a large, prosperous society you must have big business.
- benreesman 2y ago
  Walter, as you know I respect your point of view on the merits of the market in this business: God knows you’ve got about double my experience in it (and the multiple on impact is some larger coefficient I can’t even eyeball) and your opinion is logically robust, as we’ve debated before. You’ve previously argued for the merits of e.g. the Gates fortune, and as someone who went head-to-head with MSFT in the springtime of its excellence and I’m inclined to believe the guy who was there. In your opinion, which you know I respect as much as any hacker living, did Altman build anything or do anything of value to be a billionaire off AirBnB stock certainly less than 3, probably less than one year after Loopt was sold at a loss with Conway’s finger on the scales?
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Thank you for the kind words! I do appreciate them. I'm sorry to say I don't know enough about Altman to form any kind of opinion on him.
    - benreesman 2y ago
      Ultimately it’s pg who owes this community locally and humanity globally for inflicting Altman on the world, but as much as I likewise respect pg on 99/100 things, he seems to be digging his heels in on this one, so I’m not holding my breath. I gather anoxia is a bad way to go. Absent that, a few other recognized OG legends like yourself looking into the matter and rendering an opinion might represent the daylight between the status quo and disaster. Certainly he’s nothing to do with your honestly-held convictions about merit prevailing in efficient markets oriented to novel contribution. I know you believe in markets, but I think we agree there’s nothing capitalist or meritocratic about failing up repeatedly until manifestly unqualified and ill-intentioned people wield arbitrary power off an unbroken litany of failures punctuated by the occasional success in taking credit for the efforts and achievements of others via PR and powerful friends.
thelastgallon 2y ago
> I'm more interested in whether Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders, are finally becoming obvious enough now that people might finally begin to see them as the yucky byproducts of a yucky system. One of them doesn't belong on the list. Fossil fuel and legacy automobile companies killed EVs[1][2], bought all the battery patents and made sure there were no EVs made. Until Tesla made them possible, by building gigafactories so battery is not a constraint and supercharger network. Why is the list restricted to only a few tech billionaires? Where are the fossil fuel billionaires who actively do harm? 10 million people die every year from air pollution, and fossil fuels are only possible because of $7 trillion subsidies/year. Why isn't Gates on the list?[3] Koch brothers? Hundreds of middle-eastern fossil fuel princes? Warren Buffett who owns Coke (39 grams of sugar/can) fast food chains, cookies, candy, ice cream companies, fossil fuel companies, utilities that actively lobby against solar/wind. Dan and Farris Wilks, Oil billionaires who are making policy changes on many issues? [4][5][6] Where are the financial billionaires, real estate, healthcare, insurance, fast fashion, chemicals? [1] A portion of the film details GM's efforts to demonstrate to California that there was no consumer demand for their product, and then to take back every EV1 and destroy them.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au... [3] That's why Gates personally intervened to scuttle the Oxford team's plan to make its publicly funded vaccine research free to all, coercing them into doing an exclusive license deal with Astrazeneca: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/ https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/ [4] https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/institute-index-texas-fracking-tycoon-funding-anti-abortion-extremism https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/institute-index-texas-fr... [5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/24/politics/texas-far-right-politics-invs/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/24/politics/texas-far-right-poli... [6] https://www.tpr.org/news/2024-02-25/three-west-texas-billionaires-are-pushing-texas-to-the-far-right https://www.tpr.org/news/2024-02-25/three-west-texas-billion...
- bergen 2y ago
  Musk profited of what he saw benefited him, yes he pushed forward EV technology and put other carmakers under pressure which is good. But he is an completely unhinged egomanic who has no respect for working people, even those working for him and often lies for his benefit, to workers, shareholders and reporters, this is documented hundreds of times
ben_w 2y ago
> Zuckerberg He started off looking like a Lore from Star Trek, and then took the criticism seriously enough to learn to present as a genuine human. Might have been around the time FB was getting named by the UN as bearing some responsibility for a genocide though. So if anything, for him at least, the opposite.
benterix 2y ago
I think your premise is false. Yes, you can give examples of people that weren't very ethical and built successful products (like Gates and Jobs), but there are numerous examples of the opposite - many wonderful products done by people and teams who did nothing wrong (yet!). I even think believing this idea (you need to be ruthless to succeed) is dangerous. And if you behave like a boss from the 90s at some point you will be exposed. I've seen places where these people rule and they only have high turnover with the exception of these few shops where investors are funneling tons of money so employees just stopped caring.
rkachowski 2y ago
at the very least I would appreciate the sincerity of this approach. We can start having the real discussions without cosplaying as fungible hyper competent leetcode machines, and start asking which of these problems would benefit from having a weaponised sociopath at the helm. Are we working too hard on the wrong yet interesting problems or do we just need a sufficiently amoral person to manipulate, harass and cheat their way into partnerships, sales and general interest? Do we accept such behaviour is noble if we make enough success and money from it?
tim333 2y ago
>Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders Not so much wealth hoarders but products of the capitalist system where you can own a company and it may do well and become worth lots of money. And what is the alternative? Communist communal ownership of the means of production is not really cracking along these days.
berniedurfee 2y ago
> Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and Edison

ryukoposting 2y ago

> Do we accept that Sam Altmans are necessary for cool technology? Zooming out a bit, do we accept "cool technology" as a virtue? Should it factor into my evaluation of a person at all?

margalabargala 2y ago
"Cool technology" here means things like dishwashers, or MRI machines, which pretty much strictly improve people's lives, not slightly better advertisement algorithms.
- bergen 2y ago
  Pretty sure Paul Lauterbur was no douchebag and good products and inventions can come from good people.
- garte 2y ago
  I don't think you need to be an asshole to invent a dishwasher or an MRI machine. The usefulness alone lets you sell these. AI on the other hand...
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Plenty of people are finding AI to be useful. I don't know what you're hinting at.
  - thefounder 2y ago
    Invention is one thing, a product to sell is almost an entirely different thing. The more I see the more I realise that being technical is almost all the time the least important part. You need to get people around you to succeed. In practice that means investors so that you can hire and people with the right connections so you can get sweet deals. You need people skills not inventions. And a bit more fake it until you make it rather than correct/technical information.
    - tarsinge 2y ago
      That's only the VC angle. Plenty of revolutionary products will find adoption without playing the SV startup playbook. I think it's time to reevaluate the startup business "wisdom" of these past 15 years in the light of the companies and founders "role models" it has produced over that time frame. Good at making money, obviously. Holding the promise of making society better? I'll let you judge. As for me since I've read from Zero to One I have a sense I have been duped. I was once grateful for HN for opening my eyes on marketing. Now I'm hangover at how it perverted everything.

benreesman 2y ago

I’m no huge fan of the bond villains in general, but this thread isn’t about Musk or whoever being a dick. And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work. Mark at a minimum is the Corp Dev CEO of a generation and I’d argue more. I’d argue he is the first person to create an accurate-ish mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a high-fidelity digital analogy. Bezos was at DE Shaw and called the Internet as a vehicle for commerce on the early side, to put it mildly. Ellison saw that what we now call RDBMS was going to Be Big and substantially implemented the early versions personally. Now this isn’t a license for any of the icky shit any of these folks have done since, but all of them put some of the points their character class rolled into “actually build something”. Altman put all his points into manipulate if not blackmail people around me until the machine coughs up the next stair on the ladder. I’m generally in favor of “less bond villains”, but that’s not the topic of the thread and neatly bypasses another key point which is that all the other bond villains you mentioned (and I’ve met a few of them) have some redeeming quality as opposed to, Jesus, could a fucking Kennedy get away with a farce like this? Stop changing the subject. I know all those essays by heart. I was synthesizing them with inside YC baseball the day they were published.

thaumaturgy 2y ago
[flagged]
- benreesman 2y ago
  I don’t think that studying the history of the technology business makes one a tabloid journalist. I apologize if my remark came off smartass, I can see how it could. If you feel I could be more constructive I’m legitimately (no sarcasm whatsoever) open to suggestions: it’s a tricky topic and I strike the wrong note more often than the right one. Certainly I intended no personal offense to someone I haven’t met.
bergen 2y ago
No Musk builds nothing. There is a huge team he leads, consisting of engineers and scientists and they develop technology that Musk then sells. He's a glorified cars salesman. Maybe he was essential to get the rockets built, but neither did he build them, nor contribute essential technical details, so that it would be uniquely him who could do it given same financial backing.

WalterBright 2y ago

> amoral wealth-hoarders They're not hoarding wealth. They don't have any Scrooge McDuck cash faults. Their money is all invested, i.e. put to work creating things that people want. > moralists ... capitalists History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets). Like it or not, for a large, prosperous society you must have big business.

benreesman 2y ago
Walter, as you know I respect your point of view on the merits of the market in this business: God knows you’ve got about double my experience in it (and the multiple on impact is some larger coefficient I can’t even eyeball) and your opinion is logically robust, as we’ve debated before. You’ve previously argued for the merits of e.g. the Gates fortune, and as someone who went head-to-head with MSFT in the springtime of its excellence and I’m inclined to believe the guy who was there. In your opinion, which you know I respect as much as any hacker living, did Altman build anything or do anything of value to be a billionaire off AirBnB stock certainly less than 3, probably less than one year after Loopt was sold at a loss with Conway’s finger on the scales?
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Thank you for the kind words! I do appreciate them. I'm sorry to say I don't know enough about Altman to form any kind of opinion on him.
  - benreesman 2y ago
    Ultimately it’s pg who owes this community locally and humanity globally for inflicting Altman on the world, but as much as I likewise respect pg on 99/100 things, he seems to be digging his heels in on this one, so I’m not holding my breath. I gather anoxia is a bad way to go. Absent that, a few other recognized OG legends like yourself looking into the matter and rendering an opinion might represent the daylight between the status quo and disaster. Certainly he’s nothing to do with your honestly-held convictions about merit prevailing in efficient markets oriented to novel contribution. I know you believe in markets, but I think we agree there’s nothing capitalist or meritocratic about failing up repeatedly until manifestly unqualified and ill-intentioned people wield arbitrary power off an unbroken litany of failures punctuated by the occasional success in taking credit for the efforts and achievements of others via PR and powerful friends.

thelastgallon 2y ago

> I'm more interested in whether Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders, are finally becoming obvious enough now that people might finally begin to see them as the yucky byproducts of a yucky system. One of them doesn't belong on the list. Fossil fuel and legacy automobile companies killed EVs[1][2], bought all the battery patents and made sure there were no EVs made. Until Tesla made them possible, by building gigafactories so battery is not a constraint and supercharger network. Why is the list restricted to only a few tech billionaires? Where are the fossil fuel billionaires who actively do harm? 10 million people die every year from air pollution, and fossil fuels are only possible because of $7 trillion subsidies/year. Why isn't Gates on the list?[3] Koch brothers? Hundreds of middle-eastern fossil fuel princes? Warren Buffett who owns Coke (39 grams of sugar/can) fast food chains, cookies, candy, ice cream companies, fossil fuel companies, utilities that actively lobby against solar/wind. Dan and Farris Wilks, Oil billionaires who are making policy changes on many issues? [4][5][6] Where are the financial billionaires, real estate, healthcare, insurance, fast fashion, chemicals? [1] A portion of the film details GM's efforts to demonstrate to California that there was no consumer demand for their product, and then to take back every EV1 and destroy them.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au... [3] That's why Gates personally intervened to scuttle the Oxford team's plan to make its publicly funded vaccine research free to all, coercing them into doing an exclusive license deal with Astrazeneca: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/ https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/ [4] https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/institute-index-texas-fracking-tycoon-funding-anti-abortion-extremism https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/institute-index-texas-fr... [5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/24/politics/texas-far-right-politics-invs/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/24/politics/texas-far-right-poli... [6] https://www.tpr.org/news/2024-02-25/three-west-texas-billionaires-are-pushing-texas-to-the-far-right https://www.tpr.org/news/2024-02-25/three-west-texas-billion...

bergen 2y ago
Musk profited of what he saw benefited him, yes he pushed forward EV technology and put other carmakers under pressure which is good. But he is an completely unhinged egomanic who has no respect for working people, even those working for him and often lies for his benefit, to workers, shareholders and reporters, this is documented hundreds of times

ben_w 2y ago

> Zuckerberg He started off looking like a Lore from Star Trek, and then took the criticism seriously enough to learn to present as a genuine human. Might have been around the time FB was getting named by the UN as bearing some responsibility for a genocide though. So if anything, for him at least, the opposite.

benterix 2y ago

I think your premise is false. Yes, you can give examples of people that weren't very ethical and built successful products (like Gates and Jobs), but there are numerous examples of the opposite - many wonderful products done by people and teams who did nothing wrong (yet!). I even think believing this idea (you need to be ruthless to succeed) is dangerous. And if you behave like a boss from the 90s at some point you will be exposed. I've seen places where these people rule and they only have high turnover with the exception of these few shops where investors are funneling tons of money so employees just stopped caring.

rkachowski 2y ago

at the very least I would appreciate the sincerity of this approach. We can start having the real discussions without cosplaying as fungible hyper competent leetcode machines, and start asking which of these problems would benefit from having a weaponised sociopath at the helm. Are we working too hard on the wrong yet interesting problems or do we just need a sufficiently amoral person to manipulate, harass and cheat their way into partnerships, sales and general interest? Do we accept such behaviour is noble if we make enough success and money from it?

tim333 2y ago

>Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders Not so much wealth hoarders but products of the capitalist system where you can own a company and it may do well and become worth lots of money. And what is the alternative? Communist communal ownership of the means of production is not really cracking along these days.

berniedurfee 2y ago

> Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and Edison