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Mean People Fail

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• sillysaurus3 12y ago
  And yet while there are clearly a lot of mean people out there, there are next to none among the most successful people I know. What's going on here? You live in a society where successful people aren't mean. That's different from the rest of the world. Maybe a more accurate title would be "Mean People Fail in Silicon Valley" But there are at least big chunks of the world that mean people don't rule, and that territory seems to be growing. I wish more of the essay was devoted to evidence of this, because it'd be amazing if true. But I don't personally see any evidence that mean people are becoming less influential. When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. One specific counterexample: Gauss was extremely mean. And not only mean, but mean to his family: Gauss eventually had conflicts with his sons. He did not want any of his sons to enter mathematics or science for "fear of lowering the family name".[36] Gauss wanted Eugene to become a lawyer, but Eugene wanted to study languages. They had an argument over a party Eugene held, which Gauss refused to pay for. The son left in anger and, in about 1832, emigrated to the United States, where he was quite successful. Wilhelm also settled in Missouri, starting as a farmer and later becoming wealthy in the shoe business in St. Louis. It took many years for Eugene's success to counteract his reputation among Gauss's friends and colleagues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss I feel bad pointing out a counterexample like this, because it's easy to cherrypick an example of a mean person here, a mean act there. More difficult to show a general trend. But isn't the difficulty of finding examples of nice people evidence that niceness isn't very pervasive, especially throughout history?
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  • hnnewguy 12y ago
    >Maybe a more accurate title would be "Mean People Fail in Silicon Valley" Silicon Valley has the same proportion of mean, nasty, ugly people as anywhere else in the world. And some of these people are successful, just like everywhere else in the world.
  • ckaygusu 12y ago
    I believe you can find quite a few "mean" people who is just working in the Silicon Valley as happy as ever. The correct rephrasal would be "Mean People Fail More". It would be naive to think that getting along with people well, while being a remarkable trait, isn't the only thing that leads to success. There are a lot of variables controlling that. It's just common sense that if you are good with people, you are more likely to be successful. Lastly, I believe a lot of people will be spraying this thread with counterexamples as you did, but the greatest example of PG's argument is the one of the people who gave the world the Silicon Valley [1]. He could have been one of the most cherished person of the past century, he could have all the wealth he wanted, but instead he practically died alone, leaving many people with hatred towards him. Because he was "mean". [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley
  • mafribe 12y ago
    Your examples hardly show that Gauss was mean. He disagreed with his children about the path they should take in life. Most parents do. Gauss probably had a realistic appreciation of his sons' abilities. And why should parents be expected unconditionally to pay for their childrens' extravagances. Maybe the money was needed for something more important?
    • sillysaurus3 12y ago
      Specifically the last sentence: It took many years for Eugene's success to counteract his reputation among Gauss's friends and colleagues. As a parent, you just don't do that to your children. Apparently Gauss badmouthed him regularly, to the point where he acquired a reputation outside of the family. I think part of the general confusion is that "mean" and "fail" are both hard to define.
      • mafribe 12y ago
        Maybe CF Gauss had a realistic appreciation of his son's personality. I don't know. Why should parents lie about their children? You are projecting contemporary parental attitudes where little darling cannot possibly do / be wrong on somebody who lived more than 2 centuries earlier, and had six children.
  • hans0l074 12y ago
    I was wondering about pg's use of the word ruthless in this context - wouldn't one equate 'ruthless' to the extremity of meanness? There was a link here to The Loneliest Genius [1] about Newton - The servants celebrated his parting, not because they were happy for him, but because he had always treated them harshly. His personality was, they declared, fit for nothing but the university... Didn't the eccentricity of many intellectuals manifest itself as cruelty or meanness? [1] http://nautil.us/issue/19/illusions/the-loneliest-genius http://nautil.us/issue/19/illusions/the-loneliest-genius (paywall)
• acjohnson55 12y ago
  This sure sounds nice, and I believe Paul when it comes to his perception. But I'd need more convincing that this is objectively and not just something Paul sees because he's good at filtering out the people he doesn't want to work with. A couple counterexamples come to mind. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and the Uber executive team, the Github husband and wife with the Horvath incident. Of course I can't generalize these cases either, but these are prominent companies where the truism doesn't hold.
  • cpncrunch 12y ago
    And of course Kevin O'Leary.
    • barry-cotter 12y ago
      Don't forget Vinod Khosla. From reading HN one could also be forgiven far thinking that every single amazon employee in management outside AWS is devoid of all positive human traits.
    • guiomie 12y ago
      Ahahah. I don't think Kevin O'Leary is mean, he plays the persona for sure tho.
  • latch 12y ago
    This, and I suspect most people are smart enough to know they shouldn't be mean around (and especially) towards him or his wife.
    • wavefunction 12y ago
      They're real tough harassing an employee but what are they gonna do to me? Don't make me laugh about some pathetic losers like TPW and wife. They're bullies and they got what they deserved, if not enough.
    • ape4 12y ago
      Sounds like pg needs to become an undercover employee to see the other side. Try being an Uber driver.
• pptr1 12y ago
  I would love to believe what pg is saying. However there are strong counter points to his arguments. Uber and Travis Kalanick don't seem to be failing. They may have some negative publicity, but their growth is strong. Uber is probably worth more than any single yc company including Airbnb.
  • busterarm 12y ago
    There's also a tendency for people to think they're good people and not realize how they're being mean. Criminals are good at this. I think displacing the resident population of SF is pretty mean, as is creating a monoculture there. Apathy matters.
    • hnnewguy 12y ago
      >There's also a tendency for people to think they're good people and not realize how they're being mean. Criminals are good at this. "Criminals" are also good at being mistaken as mean people when they are really good.
      • busterarm 12y ago
        I don't disagree with this. Organized crime actually serves a legitimate community function in its early stages usually. They always get their hands dirty. Is that really someone that you'd want to emulate though? You could make the case that Freeway Rick Ross is a really nice guy because he never had to use violence, but he still sold crack to people.
        • hnnewguy 12y ago
          >You could make the case that Freeway Rick Ross is a really nice guy Good point. Is he "mean" or not? More curiously, is he "successful" or not?
    • graycat 12y ago
      Uber: (1) Legal. Nevada just outlawed Uber. More generally, Uber stands to encounter a lot of legal push-back. (2) Competition. In e-mail of Sat 11/22/2014 12:20 PM, CBinsights reported that Uber has "27 alternatives". (3) Localism. Yes, maybe in each city, something like Uber, if successful, could have a network effect that would let it have a barrier to entry: That is, since all the drivers use Uber, all the riders do; and since all the riders do, all the drivers do. But, the taxi business is geographically local so that success by, say, Uber in Boston does next to nothing to help Uber compete in NYC, Atlanta, Chicago, SF, LA, etc. So, in each city, Uber can be attacked by local competitors.
• droptableusers 12y ago
  Perhaps they are just good at suppressing any inconvenient opinion or thought.
  • droptableusers 12y ago
    as demonstrated here
• diminish 12y ago
  To make the case stronger we now need to move some few prominent "mean" tech figures to "not mean". Could it be that meanness and failure come in a vicious circle fortifying each other? Put in another way, as people become more successful they become less mean? Hypothetically, the Paul Graham of the failed startup accelerator YC would end up being meaner. Many homeless people end up appearing mean too. Maybe personal traits aren't innate unchangeable attributes but depend on our current status.
• geofft 12y ago
  I'm curious to know pg's thoughts on Mahbod Moghadam (although I expect that there are several reasons he'd be unable to make that public anytime soon, if ever). Did he miss the meanness when he funded Rap Genius? Is his behavior something else entirely that "mean" doesn't capture?
  • busterarm 12y ago
    If Mahbod is anything like Tom Lehman, they probably just struck pg as a bunch of smug young dudes who think/know they're hot shit. Also didn't Mahbod try and excuse his behavior with a brain tumor or something? That's actually reasonable...
  • rajacombinator 12y ago
    What makes you think Mahbod is mean? He seems like a goofball, inappropriate, no brain-mouth-filter kind of dude. But doesn't strike me as mean.
    • geofft 12y ago
      I've never met him, so I can't say he's been mean to _me_. But I feel like if I were family of Elliot Rodger or his victims or a loss prevention officer at Whole Foods, I'd consider "mean" as a possible descriptor. Anyway, that's kind of what I wanted to ask: is there a sufficient dichotomy there, such that someone without a well-developed sense of empathy or fairness can be successful by avoiding being outright mean? (And is that a good thing?)
• timruffles 12y ago
  Great to see PG trying counter Steve Jobs inspired asshole-dolatry. Certainly I think it accords with my experience: I've stuck around in jobs because of the people when better ones were available. Conversely, meanness in founders creates a mean atmosphere, and people will not be loyal.
  • larrys 12y ago
    "I've stuck around in jobs because of the people when better ones were available." But is that really in your best interest? The way this is stated this is how it breaks down: - I have a better job opportunity (all things equal meaning presumably there are nice people at that job as well at least potentially) that I have passed on. - The people at my current job are nice to me and/or my boss is nice to me and/or is not an asshole In the above case it seems that you have been disadvantaged by a loyalty that isn't based on anything concrete simply because you like the people and/or the way you are treated. Under that premise you might be a programmer at the local small 10 person wholesaler and have a great boss and a great working environment and/or a sense of loyalty because of how well you are treated. And completely miss an opportunity (assuming of course such opportunity is important to you) to work for a much larger company with much more opportunity. Or take someone teaching at a small community college who passes up a potential job at a major university (once again assuming that is a better career path). My point being that loyalty and a nice environment and the people that you work with are certainly great benefits but can also be in a sense golden handcuffs from progressing further in your career.
    • ElComradio 12y ago
      If you are looking at your life holistically, money is only one factor in how satisfied you are with your life.
• bshimmin 12y ago
  The first five comments I read more or less all disagreed with pg's basic premise. Whether or not those people are even right, that's quite depressing in and of itself.
  • gus_massa 12y ago
    From the guidelines: > Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. I think that disagreeing comments are not discouraged, if they are civil and if possible have a strong technical argument. [Note: I upvote the submission, and a few of the disagreeing comments, because I think the article is in the right direction but too optimistic.]
    • bshimmin 12y ago
      I'm not sure if you've replied to my comment unintentionally, but I fail to see where what I've written lacks civility or even expresses disagreement; it is simply an observation. (I should note that I am not complaining about my comment being down-voted - that would both be against the rules and suggest that I cared in the slightest, which I do not.)
      • gus_massa 12y ago
        Perhaps my comment is not clear. I don't think that your comment is bad. [Note: I did't downvote it.] I only think that it's not bad that some comments try to explain the weak points of an article and try to get a more deep discussion.
• jokoon 12y ago
  I would not say meanness, I would rather consider humility, the ability to be humble, to make abstractions of animal emotions. There are different kinds of success. There is victory, and there's progress. In victory, you prove you're relatively better than others. In progress, you allow the whole society to lift itself into something that is just better. That's true that you should not put money on a pedestal, but you should also understand that in order to do a better job, you should adopt a profit model just because you're in a capitalist country. Of course mean people fail. Mean people don't have any intention or long term goal for what they want to do in their field of work, they lack strategy. But on the other hand, hell is paved with good intentions.
• lmg643 12y ago
  This is a very interesting idea. I think this is "becoming more true" rather than "true." Part of the reason why I think this will never completely be the case is that starting a company involves getting lots of people to do "stuff" and there isn't just one method to do so. Being a masterful manipulator of others, right or wrong, has worked many times in the past and I doubt will ever stop working by its very nature. (Now, being an average manipulator just won't cut it...) The bar will be continually raised as long as good people continue to start companies. Hopefully this new culture doesn't fizzle out after the next funding crunch, whenever it may occur.
• MisterNegative 12y ago
  I know that the author only means to give advice. But the message can easily be misinterpreted into a generalization, which kind of makes the author seem like a mean person.
• m52go 12y ago
  > Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things. I don't think the fighting has gone anywhere. It's just changed its form. Any founder/salesperson will tell you it's harder than ever to get a prospect's or consumer's attention. Being nice has nothing to do with the ageless struggle to stand out and triumph...grit. Which, if you lack it, is the only trait I believe one can say is a sure shot to failure.
  • return0 12y ago
    Indeed , academia almost pushes people to be mean. In general, wherever there's politics instead of an objective (like an experiment), or semi-objective (like a free market) measure of success, people tend to be mean.
• parfe 12y ago
  People aren't mean in front of millionare investor. Duh? Steve jobs, bill gates, uber, dropbox, zygna. I guess those are all exception?
  • canremember 12y ago
    How was Dropbox mean?
    • rajacombinator 12y ago
      Yes please explain that one?
      • parfe 12y ago
        http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26987980 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26987980 I moved to self hosted owncloud as a result.
        • rajacombinator 12y ago
          Oh come on, appointing Condi to the board may be questionable politically but it's not "mean."
        • jayvanguard 12y ago
          That isn't mean. Reprehensible, sure, but not mean.
          • diltonm 12y ago
            Agree on not being mean. I don't even understand how it could be considered reprehensible? She's a successful, smart, black woman, raised in the deep south by educator parents. Her success is to be lauded. I'd think the pages of the more liberal HN would be the place her success could be appreciated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice#Early_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice#Early_life
• return0 12y ago
  Successful people have no reason and mentality to be mean, hence they are not. They can also afford to be generous.
• timdellinger 12y ago
  the inclusion of professors in the list of people who generally aren't mean people is... questionable. being a professor means playing many zero sum games: limited government grants for research, limited number of jobs in academia. perhaps they're nice to pg, but they're often mean to their grad students and postdocs, and to anyone else who doesn't control a scarce resource and who gets in their way.
  • redacted 12y ago
    I completely agree, and that casts a lot of the rest of the piece into question. I've worked in academia for years and I laughed out loud (and bitterly, I might add) at that.
  • jeffreyrogers 12y ago
    Yeah, I've had some professors who were quite mean to students (A small amount though, maybe 2-3, most seem to care about their students, at least at my university). I think what PG sees instead is that the people he interacts with aren't mean to him because he has power over them, so he assumes they treat everyone the same way.
    • jrs99 12y ago
      if you're at harvard, that's probably why you've only seen a "small amount" of mean professors. try a college where most professors have achieved nothing and are having a midlife crisis.
  • selmnoo 12y ago
    Some of the professors I know are basically mobsters. They threaten to have people fired if they don't walk the walk the prof. wants them to walk, they operate in rigged peer-reviewing committees, when sitting on grant review committees they fund their friends even when their grant proposals are bad; and give bad scores to proposals from folks they don't like. The more I stay in academia, the more I find out this is normal. Especially on the top, especially in elite universities. This is disheartening particularly to me because I used to work in corporate, and I used to think then "boy, my work is not being fulfilled here". Now I come here and find out it's backstabbing all the way. I find out that the only way for me to get ahead is by taking sides, being a suck-up, and doing the dirty work the professors want me to do. The professors who've gotten ahead, they know this and basically orchestrate the game.
• Hermel 12y ago
  There are plenty of counterexamples, also in Silicon Valley. For example, both Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins made a lot of money, but depending on which side you believe, at least one of them is mean. Anyway, the basic message is correct: when it comes to startups, it pays of more to focus on baking a bigger cake, than on fighting for a bigger slice.
• PaulAJ 12y ago
  I think PG is conflating the personal spite of Internet trolls with the ruthless drive to acquire wealth that marks out investment bankers, warlords and drug dealers. The latter might do some very nasty or underhanded things, but they regard it as "just business", as opposed to the personal bile you get from trolls. Trollery is certainly not conducive to success because it destroys trust between you and the people you need to work for you. But if you can create a trusting circle of cronies then together you can lead them to do great but terrible things.
  • tormeh 12y ago
    Conclusion: Being mean doesn't pay, being ruthless does.
    • regency 12y ago
      Mean is an umbrella term that could be a lot of things, including ruthless. I'll use parallel analogies to make my point: Mean is to Martial Arts as Ruthless is to Goju Ryu Karate.
    • crimsonalucard 12y ago
      Isn't ruthlessness just a type of meanness?
  • YuriNiyazov 12y ago
    It's not PG that's doing that conflating, it's the rest of the commenters on this thread. Edit To Downvoters: I am not being randomly flippant. Larger explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674961
• coldtea 12y ago
  1) People are usually mean (or meaner) to subordinates -- so not much reason to be mean to PG for most people he meets. 2) Most succesfull people are also good at PR and pretending to be nice to everybody, especially somebody like PG, but in general too. They can still be very mean in covert ways.
• mattmanser 12y ago
  Perhaps pg and I have a different understanding of the word mean, but I doubt it as the opposing word he uses to describe the founders is "good people". These are just the ones coming to my head: Apple, Steve Jobs, widely known for being an asshole. Fucked over early employees. Facebook, Zuck, completely fucked over his mates when money appeared. Microsoft, Bill Gates, ruthlessly exterminated opposition and known for bullying staff. Oracle, Larry Ellison Zynga, Marcus Pincus, "I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues". Uber, acting like complete dicks. Kim Dotcom, nuff said. I think once you've been mean/ruthless/evil in business you may come out the other side and do some nice things, but you have to ask, will it ever be enough? Will Bill Gates ever make up for the billions of damage he caused humanity by using underhand tactics to destroy his opposition? Maybe. But while everyone praises him at the moment, I can't help but think he deliberately held the internet back for 6 or 7 years for his own profit. You almost can't start calculating the damage he caused precisely because it is so mind boggling. Perhaps you don't agree with me, but imho this is the most bizarre essay I've read by pg, and I really don't agree with most of his political leanings, so for me that's saying a lot. The truly great startup founders have to be nice on the outside but when push comes to shove, complete assholes on the inside. And of course investors are going to see the nice side. Edit: And it occurs to me, funnily enough pg seems to be one of the major counterexamples, a good founder, as when he setup YC it was a game changer because here was a rich dude taking time out to help a bunch of young people and then put his money where his mouth was when people started asking him "so where do we get this seed funding". It was so remarkable because he actually took the time. Edit 2: There seems to be some debate on the meaning of "mean". I'd point to pg's own essay on philosophy to dismiss this sophistry. He uses "good" and "benevolent" as the opposites, not "polite" or "diplomatic". I also appreciate BG created trillions of value, so he's definitely an overall net +ve, but he destroyed as well as created.
  • hnnewguy 12y ago
    >I can't help but think he deliberately held the internet back for 6 or 7 years for his own profit. First, the degree to which he "held back" the internet, when contrasted with what Microsoft did positively for home computing and the internet, is debatable. Second, if Bill Gates can't be construed as a good person doing good things in the world-- as "not mean"-- then this debate is mostly pointless.
• flurie 12y ago
  This essay seems to spend quite a bit of time talking about a term that it never defines. And, assuming there's a definition, does meanness count if it is not made manifest? I think we can probably agree without a more specific definition that a sociopath is mean, but are they only mean if we catch their sociopathy? And if we consider aggression a mean behavior, is aggression universal, or is behavior only aggression in certain contexts?
• s3nnyy 12y ago
  I agree with PG on this trend. In "Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux you'll get more evidence that lack of meanness leads to success: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcS04BI2sbk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcS04BI2sbk Particularly the example of Buurtzorg, a Dutch healthcare provider, is quite convincing: They went from 0% to 80% market-share by basically being less mean to their employees and clients. (This Ask-HN discussion is also related to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8662376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8662376)
• tbarbugli 12y ago
  bullshit
• SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  I note that this is on the front page at the same time as a story entitled 'Being homeless is better than working for Amazon' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8673726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8673726
• rajacombinator 12y ago
  Yikes this is clearly wildly inaccurate wishful thinking. If history has shown us anything, it is that the worst usually rise to the top. Nice sentiment by pg, but simply horribly untrue.
• michaelmcmillan 12y ago
  I always find these essays interesting, not necessarily because I agree with them, but rather because Paul has a very special way of looking at things. [...] being mean makes you stupid. Linus Torvalds is definitely not stupid, but I would not hesitate to call him mean [1]. But you can't deny that he's successful and certainly he's not stupid [2]. Business and open source seem to both center around the same things: creating something people want [3] and surrounding yourself with other smart people. I would imagine that the latter is hard if you're mean - but not impossible. Take Linus or Steve Jobs, none of whom are very nice. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8#t=883 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8#t=883 [2] http://www.wincent.com/a/about/wincent/weblog/archives/2007/07/a_look_back_bra.php http://www.wincent.com/a/about/wincent/weblog/archives/2007/... [3] http://paulgraham.com/good.html http://paulgraham.com/good.html
  • ema 12y ago
    Linus Torvalds is rude, not mean.
    • boracay 12y ago
      As I understand it the difference between rude and mean is a matter of intention. With mean being intentional. Linus behavior is frequently explained with him only behaving that way when people deserve it. Making him, or at least his behavior, mean rather than rude.
      • MisterBastahrd 12y ago
        Which is a pile of complete BS. If all actions were fully justified simply because the person doing the deed felt a certain way, then we would need no laws nor rules of conduct because everyone would always show the correct behavior. He's more than old enough to know that the kind of language he uses is meant to be insulting. He's a jackass.
    • michaelmcmillan 12y ago
      That burns down to how you define 'mean'. In my book, this is mean: "Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FUCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fuck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495
• heyts 12y ago
  This seems apropos from what I remember of it: - http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/dp/1594485755 http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/d... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYemnKEKx0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYemnKEKx0c
• applecore 12y ago
  The problem with this argument is that a person's identity is more complex than the manifestation of a single personality trait. You may judge character at its worst, but those mean people on the internet are also loving in other, more meaningful contexts. If you're going to ask whether meanness and success are "inversely correlated"—a phrase peculiar to statistics—then you should present actual data to support that argument.
• vincentchan 12y ago
  I think LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said it best regarding this topic: "being an asshole was way easier than putting in the work and showing the compassion required to be a good leader."
• jayshahtx 12y ago
  I've thought about this topic quite a bit, and I don't think the root emotion in many "mean" people is, well...meanness. I think it is a strong desire to control. This desire stems from the importance of managing execution. To be quite honest, if Steve Jobs wasn't dominating, maybe the iPod Nano would have been much thicker. Maybe the Facebook experience would have sucked. Maybe Tesla would have filed bankruptcy. There is a long list of "Maybes" which could go here. From a societal standpoint, it's interesting. Ask someone in 1991 if Jobs in an asshole, the resounding answer is likely to be "yes". Ask someone today, and it's almost always pardoned with a "but he was a genius". I had this very internal debate with myself throughout undergrad, particularly when you are placed in a group where you care the most for what ever project. The one who cares the most tends to have the most complete vision, and thus will strongly desire the pieces to fall a certain way. I'd like to believe that not everyone is mean, but I can't help but wonder how possible it is to avoid "meanness" when the success of your organization hinges on your ability to execute a vision no one else can realize.
• tacos 12y ago
  What a strange and weak word to build an essay around. Especially since counterexamples are so easy to find. I've certainly found that when I'm in a position of power people are kinder than when I'm not. And I've met a lot of "mean" people that I can disarm in a few seconds once I determine where that energy is coming from. (Are they scared? Overwhelmed? Defensive due to another, more buried issue?) Works online and off, in tech and the arts. Sometimes even while driving. This essay offers no insights into the human condition -- and the detour into aggression/fighting is particularly weak and unsupported. People have lots of reasons for being mean (or an asshole) in certain situations. And I'm certain pg, like all of us, has exhibited those behaviors at times.
  • gcv 12y ago
    Indeed. One wonders why none of the people credited at the bottom pointed out the problems brought up in this thread. Or perhaps they did.
  • heyts 12y ago
    I agree that the term mean is a very strange and relative term. 'Mean' is ultimately dependent on personal views, in my opinion.
• practicalpants 12y ago
  Being on the Internet just means you get to be honest, brutally honest, no polite formalities. It's a wonderful thing, really. OTOH, working with people face to face means you must keep appearances, and you almost always cannot be brutally honest. Even if you claim your company has a culture where you can be honest about things, no one is actually going to be totally honest, that would be a mistake. And you can never know whether someone who seems 100% authentic and kind isn't going to go online and rip apart things he thinks are dumb/ act "mean." I think his essay is really more about how successful people just know how to be diplomatic and hold back honest opinions. I would however be interested for PG to write about whether he thinks selfish and overly narcissistic founders are successful or not. I haven't meant any "mean" people working professionally (with engineers at least), but selfish to the point where you feel like punching them I most certainly have met in the startup world.
  • codingdave 12y ago
    Now I am wondering if there is a correlation between mean people and cynicism.
• Codhisattva 12y ago
  Kindness is it's own reward.
• no_future 12y ago
  I've read most of pg's essays and he seems to contradict himself a lot: From this one: "There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to build great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence. The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money. The ones driven by money take the big acquisition offer that nearly every successful startup gets en route. [1] The ones who keep going are driven by something else. They may not say so explicitly, but they're usually trying to improve the world. Which means people with a desire to improve the world have a natural advantage. [2]" From "Why there aren't more Googles": "Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world. Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo—what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time—didn't sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo's or MSN's search box. Why isn't it? Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to change the world for the better. This has a nice sound to it, but it isn't true. Google's founders were willing to sell early on. They just wanted more than acquirers were willing to pay. It was the same with Facebook. They would have sold, but Yahoo blew it by offering too little. Tip for acquirers: when a startup turns you down, consider raising your offer, because there's a good chance the outrageous price they want will later seem a bargain. [1]" Though, I guess when you're that rich you can't help but think that anything that comes out of your mouth is a golden gospel, even if it is at odds with your previous statements. It sure is easy to play the whole holier-than-thou "I don't care about money I care about changing the world" game when you're already loaded.
  • aangjie 12y ago
    I think you're being too harsh on this one. We live in a extremely complex world, and he's writing about something that 's (IMO) a multi-dimensional space. Am not clear about seeing the inconsistency(in this case) , nevertheless, in such complex spaces, inconsistent statements might result from an attempt to be complete.(Godels' theorem relevant here??).
    • no_future 12y ago
      The inconsistency is that I don't think anyone would say Google isn't one of the most if not THE most successful web era companies, and according to pg the founders weren't driven by a "spirit of benevolence" which in the current essay in question he attributes the most successful founders with.
• Sakes 12y ago
  From my life experience suffering and overcoming obstacles builds not only character, but more specifically empathy. People that have experienced success too quickly or inherited it don't have the correct vantage point to understand their success or the struggle of others. I love that right now in silicon valley there is an abundant amount of successful good willed people. But if those lessons are not correctly passed down to their children, and this period of mobility stops (as it has in every other industry) the successful will be overpopulated once again by disconnected self important inherited wealth elites.
• VuongN 12y ago
  While I think successful folks do a fair share of "rewriting history" especially about spots in their timeline which could be considered "mean", I would much prefer PG's optimistic view. It keeps me more hopeful and that I could make the harder choice to be a good person for long-term success than to be a bad one for instant gratified returns. There's no problem in being hopeful and I welcome such positive "opinions".
• Xcelerate 12y ago
  I agree with some of the others on here saying this might be a case of confirmation bias. I have found that people are "nice" to me when they can get something out of it. It's only when I catch them treating (or talking about) someone else in a certain way that their true colors reveal themselves. I have exceptionally poor skills at judging a person's true intentions and moral character. Hence, I trust almost no one. That's not to say that there aren't any trustworthy people -- I'm sure there are plenty. It's just to say that I've had some bad experiences that have led me to lose complete confidence in my ability to judge which people are really kind and nice people, and which are essentially faking it (it's one reason I'm scared to get married). And with someone like PG, most startup founders want something from him (capital, networking, etc.) and so you could argue that he isn't going to notice the ones who have successfully faked being a "nice" person toward him. > Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean. I really like this. It makes me happy to see someone else state it. If I ever have children, the one thing I want them to be more than anything else is kind people.
• grandalf 12y ago
  I've seen a few startup developers who are mean toward other members of their team. In the cases I've seen these were insecure guys (based on other behavior) who felt very threatened by some junior members of the team who were smarter and more technically skilled. The worst part was that the senior management had the impression that "good developers are mean" and so the situation wasn't dealt with. It's one thing to be blunt and honest, but some people get mean when their own skill level isn't sufficient to make a convincing technical argument.
• no_future 12y ago
  The idiom "nice guys finish last" isn't an idiom for no reason, Paul. Just because you're good at picking out people who you want to give money and support to doesn't mean that their niceness has any correlation with the hundreds of other founders who you don't, much less the business world in general.
• robg 12y ago
  Thomas Edison is perhaps the best counterexample, especially as compared to Tesla. Edison won exactly because he was willing to be very mean. http://www.amazon.com/Topsy-Startling-Crooked-Elephant-American/dp/0802119042 http://www.amazon.com/Topsy-Startling-Crooked-Elephant-Ameri...
  • Agathos 12y ago
    Edison lost the War of the Currents, which is what he killed the elephant for. The whole episode was bizarre, and I'd file it under "unhinged" instead of "mean." Was he born like that, or did his early successes turn him into a stubborn, crazy old man?
• aelaguiz 12y ago
  It seems like many of the commenters here are confusing corporate strategy/tactics with individual mean-ness. I'm not saying its good when a corporation takes action to derive profit at the expense of the public interest or that of one of their competitors - however, it's not nearly the same as an individual being malicious or petty when given power over others (such as a founder routinely has).
• deleted 12y ago
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• lnanek2 12y ago
  It would be nice if he had more data in this essay. His findings don't match my own. As a software engineer, all the nice people tend to just hand wave and OK and write kind of crappy, worthless features and implementation that don't do their job very well - they aren't good for the users or even the business. You end up with things like the Google IO conference app stuck with a couple different events and called a new product. Mean people on the other hand are willing to say, hey, doing work on the UI thread and giving the user a bad, unresponsive user experience is bad and it needs to be done right. It's mean and it sucks, but you have to throw all this out and rewrite it better. Hey, just shoving new data in a complex data browsing framework doesn't give the user what they want when they want big pictures and easy to flick through options, etc.. Sure it is nice to let crappy ideas and implementations and whatnot through and just be nice to the person you are dealing with or working with, but it doesn't produce good results. In my experience it usually just produces me working weekends to fix their broken shit while they go around thinking they do a good job.
  • kenrikm 12y ago
    Being a pushover does not make you "nice" there are correct ways to write good software and pointing that out in a respectful way is not mean. However walking upto a person and saying you're an idiot this feature is useless you write terrible code etc.. certainly is.
  • Htsthbjig 12y ago
    In my experience as entrepreneur and manager of a software company I believe one of the essential qualities as manager is to understand what is going to happen(predict) if people follow a path and DO NOT LET IT HAPPEN. It is like controlling a RC hellicopter or quadcopter, you need to do very shuttle movements and is almost effortless. But if you let it to destabilize, the thing is hitting the ground hard and trying to fix it could make it worse. If you leave someone working 6 months on something, you better control it correcting deviations soon, instead of just telling the person that all their work is worthless later. People that avoid confrontation at all cost could make thing worse as when they are forced to act it is too late.
    • 12y ago
• jeeb_X 12y ago
  I don't think you can generalize being mean. There is various cultural interpretations of what it means to be mean. History is replete with cases of mean and cruel people succeeding in their objectives.
• stonogo 12y ago
  This headline may as well be "nobody is mean to the rich guy."
• guiomie 12y ago
  I see a lot of posts with counter-examples, the biggest one being Steve Jobs. Perhaps, the conclusion PG should have had was: being mean will increase you chances of failing, thus limit your success. Maybe if Steve Jobs would have not been mean, he would have accomplished even more great things ...
  • robertlagrant 12y ago
    But that's nonsense; there's no way to disprove PG's claim if you make it untestable like that.
• yatoomy 12y ago
  Dear, Larry Ellison...
• AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  PG needs to get out more because his economic arguments are way off. Perhaps SV is a magical land where money just falls into your lap but for the rest of us in the real world it's a knock down drag out fight. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things. This is insane - nothing has fundamentally changed that makes scarcity no longer a primary driver for competition. The metrics for all startups etc... are scarce resources, namely cash and labor. Even if you assume that there is a glut of startup cash, the process proves that VC/Angel dollars are still scarce. Maybe that is a narrow interpretation of that phrase though. Maybe he means that instead of "capturing" real goods like real estate, or oil or something like that which would be more apt for the "scarcity" title, the economy is leaning towards "knowledge" jobs. This just shows me how extremely disconnected from reality PG is. The reality is that the world that he lives in (technology dev/VC etc...) rides on top of the cutthroat international game of resource dominance that he ignores. The real estate, energy and hardware resources that underlie the technology market are absolutely fixed pie games (when analyzed from production/consumption standpoint) where the most ruthless win. Very disappointing that one of the start-up world's "thought leaders" has his head so high in the clouds he can't see his foundations.
  • gnaritas 12y ago
    > Very disappointing that one of the start-up world's "thought leaders" has his head so high in the clouds he can't see his foundations. Money does tend to allow one to become disconnected from reality.
  • btilly 12y ago
    No, something has changed and PG understands it while you don't. As http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html explains, what you are missing is that what people really want is wealth, not money. And wealth is things of value created by people. As productivity improves, we can create more wealth. One form of that wealth is that we can make more efficient use of fundamentally scarce resources. Which admittedly does not increase them, but does decrease pressure on them. The aggregate effect of these trends over time is truly remarkable. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo for a vivid demonstration of how remarkable it is.
• codingdave 12y ago
  I suspect there is also something at play here, in that as people become more successful, they tend to want to share their success with others, and they get less mean. I do question the idea that taking an early big acquisition offer should be called a failure. The definitions of what startup success looks like seems to be highly skewed when coming out of YC vs. what the rest of the world thinks. I live in Utah, where there are countless small tech companies, with a dozen or so employees, who have been creating their products and building comfortable lives for themselves for years. We're all quite happy with our lives, but because we aren't experiencing 100% year over year growth and "only" pulling in a few million a year, we don't meet the definition of success put forth by YC. It is important to keep in mind that YC;s purpose is not to help any single specific individual. They work with large groups, with a goal to increase their investment over a diversified portfolio of companies. I see no evidence that they are malicious about it - they do seem to be benevolent. But their ultimate goals do not match up with my goals as an individual coder. So their definitions and philosophy will also differ, and I recommend that people just keep that in mind as they read.
• snappy173 12y ago
  I think pg forgot that he is in the privileged position to be handing out large sums of money to these people.
• trevelyan 12y ago
  Worth mentioning that the vast majority of statistical research in psychology disagrees with Paul, and shows pretty conclusively that "agreeableness" negatively correlates with business success and skill at things like problem-solving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_and_life_outcomes#Career_Outcomes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_and_life_outcomes#C... Startups may be different, but if Paul is correct what he is saying implies that successful founders are less likely to succeed when working for other companies. This would be interesting if true, but also such an unexpected finding that it seems more likely he and Jessica are simply nice people who are personally biased towards surrounding themselves with other nice people.
• deleted 12y ago
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• guelo 12y ago
  This essay seems like a nice story intended for his kids that got out of control on him and he started believing it himself. It sucks teaching your kids that the world is a mean, brutal place.
• d_luaz 12y ago
  it seems to me people here are pretty mean.
• mpatachi 12y ago
  If we start by defining a mean person as one looking for either win - lose or even more, no win - lose (aka, being mean for no reason), I think there are several points for which people are less mean in the startup world and being mean give you less chances to succeed. First of all, I believe that being in a startup is less about “fighting” for an existent market (where someone needs to loose in order for the other to win), but about creating new value and trying to capture the most of it. Founders are (should be) more inclined to think about win-win solutions so that the adoption is high. Secondly, compared to the corporate world, in a startup the focus in on creating value, versus protecting positions and internal politics. On the other side, public profiling and feedback incentivize founders to be at least careful about how they reflect to the world. Nonetheless, being at the beginning of a road, they are more inclined to be nice in order to attract and retain customers & employees. Without saying that there’s no meanness in the startup world, I would agree that the degree of kindness is higher here than into the corporate world.
• javajosh 12y ago
  This essay bothers me, not because of it's sentiment (which I appreciate) but because of it's methods. In particular, it seems like pg is comparing people he knows from the present (with a strong selection bias that he acknowledges) with people he's read about in the past. The number of historical figures to pick from is much larger, and so you'd be able to pick out more people with virtually any characteristic you care to name from the larger pool. In my limited world view, mean people often win. Mean police win. Mean politicians (like Putin) win. Mean business people like Steve Jobs, Donald Trump and Larry Ellison win. No-one likes to be the target of meanness because it is a kind of psychic assault, an expression of derision or hatred or contempt. But it is remarkable what people are willing to tolerate, or even support, if they believe that it is in their best interest to tolerate it. I wish the world was more like the one pg describes, and I can see how it is becoming more like that in certain areas, which is good. But that is a far cry from equating meanness with economic failure.
  • vixen99 12y ago
    Agreed! Forgive me for descending to the trivial: it's 'its methods'.
• bokonist 12y ago
  The trouble with this thesis is that most people are situationally mean or nice. People like Steve Jobs or Lyndon Johnson were legendary for being charming to people they needed but abusive to people who were under their thumb. Zuck can be a nice person to many people, but also can be an asshole to people who he thinks are not useful to him and who are wasting his time. It goes the other way too. Paul Graham compares founders to internet trolls. I know someone in real life, who got banned from this forum and real life events due to trolling and hurling insults. That person is quite nice in real life (or, at least he is nice around me). In many cases the troll on the internet is the person who in real life has to always bite their tongue and say the nice thing, trolling on the internet is the one place where they can be the Steve Jobs asshole and not suffer consequences. PG is a millionaire investor. I can readily believe that any founder who cannot shield their mean and ruthless streak from PG, would not be a good founder. Successful people are very adept at knowing when to work the charm, and when to be ruthless, knowing when they have to hold their tongue, and when they can speak their mind without consequences. I'm trying to think of what evidence would convince me that founders were actually less mean than your average high-level person in some other industry. I think you would need to do a series of private interviews with their subordinates and ask questions about how often they get berated or screwed over. I'd also be interested in hearing the experience of anyone who has switched from being mid-level in finance to mid-level in tech. Is there really a difference in "meanness"? PG cites Jessica's experience, but she was switching to a position in tech where she had the position of dominance over the founders, so she always seeing their good side. It has been my experience that the people at the top in tech generally have a ruthless streak. Tech founders and execs are more ruthless/situationally mean than the people at the bottom. The founders have the ability to turn a switch and treat employees as tools, rather than people. This may be necessary if you have to fire people and make other hard decisions. I do not think that this ruthless streak is necessarily a bad thing. "There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to build great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence...They may not say so explicitly, but they're usually trying to improve the world." Keep in mind that a desire "to improve world" is a synonym for a "lust for power." The first is a positive way of putting it, the second is a pejorative, but it is the same thing. A neutral phrasing is that founders "desire influence". Founders hold on to their startup rather than selling because they like being in the thick of things, having attention, being able to shape and move a service that millions of people use, and have an impact on tens of millions of people. This desire for influence is not at all incompatible with being an asshole to people who are not useful or who are in the way. "Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them." Anyone who is mean all the time will certainly fail. Who are these people though? Most people who are indiscriminately cruel are probably also low IQ (they are not even smart enough to manipulate) and max out at being a sales manager for Dundler-Mifflin. All things being equal, an employee would rather work for a nice boss than a mean boss. But employees also want to work for a winner, and will often accept a boss with a mean streak as a trade-off in order to work for a winner. "Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things." The "but" should be an "and". The "scarce resources" are market opportunities for capturing a lucrative monopoly with only minimal upfront costs. Based on the underlying state of technology, there are only so many opportunities for a small team of hackers to build simple apps that can gain traction and turn into wildly successful products. Startups also require a large amount of hustling. You have to convince a lot of people to bet on you before there is solid evidence that you have a great product. The amount of hustling, salesmanship, confidence games, self-promotion, "naughtiness", that can be required would make a lot of us hackers feel very uncomfortable. So while there is a selection for makers, there is also a selection for people who have a fair amount of narcissism and who are comfortable pushing ethical boundaries. It might be that YC is particularly good at picking and accelerating startups based on having founders who are great makers rather than great sellers. This really would generate a better class of founder, and would make their startups more ethical and less mean than the typical VC backed startup. If this is the case, then kudos to YC.
• maddalab 12y ago
  I am going to guess, what you really mean, is that you have not met successful people who have been mean to you or someone you associate with, or your inference is driven by a sampling bias. Some points I agree with (a) Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things. (b) that being mean makes you fail (* increases the likelihood of you failing) (c) Start ups win by transcending Some points I disagree with (a) Mean people fail (b) Successful startup founders, programmers, professors, aren't (all) mean (c) Startups are not just one random type of work in which meanness and success are inversely correlated -- This is just a sampling bias
• softdev12 12y ago
  So I remember there were studies and a book that showed successful CEOs are 4 times more likely than the general population to be psychopaths (i.e. dangerous evil predators). One of the most successful CEOs was this guy Al Dunlop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_J._Dunlap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_J._Dunlap). They called him Chainsaw Dunlop because he fired so many people. Here's a Forbes article from 2011 that talks about the book and why (some) psychopaths make great CEOs. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-some-psychopaths-make-great-ceos/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-som...
• japhyr 12y ago
  > Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. This is a wonderful quote, and a wonderful guiding principle. It's not correct in every single situation, but I don't think pg is speaking in absolutes. How do you revolutionize a field? Not by immediately trying to replace an existing player, but by building something so useful that it gets adopted until it is a major player in the field.
• fasteo 12y ago
  At least for me, this is a good case of lost in translation. I am unable to find a good translation of "meanness" to Spanish. I have come up with "miserable" or the more slangy "cutre", but I am not sure that these words capture its full meaning. Any hint ?
  • quicklyfrozen 12y ago
    In this context, willing to cause harm to others for your own gain.
    • fasteo 12y ago
      "mezquino" is the word then. Thanks
  • Htsthbjig 12y ago
    Apático and altivo. But in the context of companies "Sin escrúpulos" makes a good match.
• xftp 12y ago
  A lot of mean people succeed, but they don't show it, succesful mean people have charisma (polititians, drug dealers etc...) that's why they succeed, so you can be mean as long as you have charisma and leadership. Beeing mean is part of success.
• presty 12y ago
  > For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. (...) > That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things. I'm not an economist and my mental model of things is probably wrong, but how is business never a zero-sum game? Are users and their money not scarce resources that they'll either spend in your products (and thus funding your survival and your competitors' demise) or in your competitors' products (and thus funding their survival and your eventual demise)?
• graeme 12y ago
  This essay needs refinement. The other comments have rightly pointed out some flaws (people more likely to be nice to PG, known prominent counterexamples, etc.) I'd like to add a counterpoint. My own niche is nearly devoid of meanness. There are several participants offering products. They overlap, but none compete directly with each other. Customers typically use materials from multiple sources. I think this influences those of us in the niche. Being nice is rewarded more than being mean. Competitors tend to collaborate. I think this is a growing phenomenon. Unlike traditional business, the internet tends to create businesses without perfect substitutes. Cooperation becomes relatively more important than competition. Peter Thiel's argument about monopolies resonated with me for this reason. In this environment, niceness becomes relatively more useful, and meanness becomes relatively more harmful. The keyword being relatively. Where I think PG misses the mark is that there's still a lot of meanness. I think the interesting question to explore is whether there's less of it in the internet sector than in others. (There may or may not be. I don't know what other niches and offline niches are like.)
• regency 12y ago
  I take it Uber didn't get the memo.
• carsongross 12y ago
  "Mean people fail" seems like a reasonably testable hypothesis. Paul could have his wife meet a random sample of startup founders in as double-blind a manner as possible (not just at social events or where they are attempting to curry favor with YC and mixed in with plenty of non-founders) then track the results of them. I am not optimistic that the results would be what he'd like, but I'm always willing to consider new evidence.
• noobplusplus 12y ago
  When I was in 2nd Grade. I used to think my maths teacher was the most intelligent mathematician in the world, and then I grew up. He still teaches maths, the way he used to do. There are still students in the 2nd Grade, they might think alike. But then, I look back at him, his teachings(maths lessons) do not add value to me anymore. On the other hand, there are mean people I know of amongst the meanest on earth. They do play tricks, figure out people who are inexperienced and trick them. They will keep doing the same, its in their genes. Those shameless jerks, will remain shameless. Desperate for success, by hook or by crook, and so will their off springs be. Desperate.
• gct 12y ago
  PG decided this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ#t=2179 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ#t=2179 was the right way to shut down a question he didn't think was up to snuff so I guess I'm not going to take his opinion on what is/isn't "mean" too seriously
  • blueside 12y ago
    wow, just wow. what an incredibly over the top dick response
    • gct 12y ago
      I thought so too, but no one else seems to care. That guy's probably never going to ask another question in a setting like that ever again.
• ebbv 12y ago
  I am kind of speechless at this assertion. I'd ask if Mr. Graham is serious, but he clearly is. I think instead of the assertion "mean people fail" being true, I think instead we can more truthfully say: People who lack the interpersonal skills to hide their meanness when it can be damaging fail. Mr. Graham, you are a well known millionaire investor. Of course start up founders are going to be on their best behavior around you. And the ones who aren't, are going to fail because not only will you not be interested in helping them, but none of your friends will either. If someone lacks the self control to behave around you, then they probably lack the self control to behave around others. But knowing how to behave is not the same as being a nice person. Someone can act very nice to everyone and still be a cold hearted son of a bitch. You can be really polite and friendly while you are destroying someone's life.
• DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  Business is where friends meet each other and help each other out. Now _big_ business? Different story entirely. I've been privileged enough to work with lots of different businesses, of all types and sizes. I find that as a business grows, it becomes easy for managers and planners to become distanced from the "friends" they are trying to help. It's no wonder PG sees mean people fail at startups: startups are supposed to be extremely emotionally close to problems or inefficiences that huge numbers of people face.
• ryguytilidie 12y ago
  I wonder what Paul would think if he was interacting with these "not mean" people in a capacity other than super successful rich guy that these people need in order to make money. Seems like a bit of a lack of self awareness to say "welp, these guys are nice to me, the person they most need to be nice to, so they must be nice guys".
• zeeshanm 12y ago
  I think PG's point-of-view is rhetorical to discourage founders to be mean. Who knows if being mean directly or indirectly correlates with being "successful" as a founder. One may have to spend five years researching historical evidence to prove or disprove such a broad perspective.
  • mean_people 12y ago
    I strongly agree with your first sentence, and I'm surprised that yours was the only comment making this point given the number of posts in this thread.
• brianstorms 12y ago
  I remember one famous startup I was in, one that went public, where the founder/ceo was genuinely mean, as in a nasty, litigious, selfish, self-centered, emotionally immature son-of-a-bitch, and ran the place like a tyrant. I quit two years in. Simply could not stand being in the same room as that ceo. But did he fail? No and yes. No, financially; he made over a hundred million. Yes, personally, I would say; his reputation as a tyrant has stuck with him, and most friends I know who worked at that company would never in a million years work for him again. He's the only truly mean-to-the-core founder/ceo I've dealt with in startups.
• webwright 12y ago
  PG is pretty careful with his word choices, and I think he's probably right about being mean interfering with success. You can not be mean, but still be a healthy distance from kind, good-hearted, honest, justice-minded, generous, etc. A question successful people ask themselves is "Why be mean? What do I get out of it? What does my company get out of it?" They can be ruthless but realize that treating people with respect and warmth is smart in the long-game. Forum-trolls don't ask that question-- they just get emotional satisfaction from being mean. Note that I'm not saying successful people are necessarily ruthless and manipulative-- just that they CAN be and still correctly be called "not mean".
• JoseVigil 12y ago
  Around Paul and Ycombinator there are a certain amount of policies that apply to the creation of killer startups and they have been very successful on proving them, being good is one. A good person inside -and outside acting on behalf- of a company is definitely in the checklist for creating a great startup, I can personally tell. Modern leaders do not fit into the vertical violent commander type and simply loose followers without assembling. However real life is much more grotesque, dantean and mean than that and bad people sometimes win. In my country there are lots of them and usually respond to a much larger and corrupted ecosystem.
• freshflowers 12y ago
  Successful people have the luxury of isolating themselves completely for the consequences their actions have on the "little people". They can afford to be "nice" in person while their actions fuck over multitudes in way that is a thousand times uglier than being a dick to someone in person.
• chacham15 12y ago
  The problem with an essay like this is that it creates a dichotomy of good and mean. If a person is good or mean at one point in life, it doesnt mean that they were always that way or will always be that way. For example, as @mattmanser points out: Steve Jobs, Zuck, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Marcus Pincus, Uber, Kim Dotcom may all have done mean things in their lives but as @paul attests, at least some of them are actually good people. In conclusion, I think that the definition of "good person" and "mean person" are just too broad to make any sort of scientific conclusions.
• slewis 12y ago
  Not sure if it's true that mean people fail. But here's a theory as to why nice people succeed: niceness is correlated with a sense of empathy, empathy is the ability to understand people unlike one's self, the understanding of people is critical to generating large swathes of change in the world (which is made up of people). Or to put another way, a smart person who wants to effect change should try to develop a sense understanding of those they want to effect, it's harder to be mean to people whose "shoes you've walked in".
• leephillips 12y ago
  Woz is nice. Jobs was mean. We know who got more money. But I know whose hand I'd rather shake.
• gvr 12y ago
  During my 14 years in Silicon Valley I haven't met any successful founders that I'd characterize as mean. Lots of them have come across as sociopathic and ruthlessly egoistic, but that's something different. They've made their way to success by looking at the economics and optimizing for themselves. If this meant manipulating, lying and breaking promises to cofounders, employees, customers, investors, etc so be it. But... I'm not sure even Steve Jobs was mean; I think he was extremely hard on people because that was the best way he knew to get the results he wanted. I never met him. Anyway, it seems to me that most people (at least here in the west) would vastly prefer a product created by people that operate with integrity, humanity and decency to one created by dicks all else equal. And that a slightly inferior product can beat a better one out by having a better more positive story behind it. I think there are already economic incentives for founders to behave well and that this trend will continue. The employees and customers talk freely on secret, glassdoor, etc and I think it's critical to realize that if you don't operate with decency and good values people will a) know about it, b) make purchasing decisions based on that, c) take that into account when considering employment. I think companies will increasingly make an active effort to (if nothing else for purely financial reasons): a) operate with decency and good human values b) protect and elevate the company and it's people by making this clear to the public
• graycat 12y ago
  Apparently PG's essay can use some reflection, and there are a lot of perceptive, well written posts in this thread. Maybe one of the main points in several of the comments in this thread is very old: And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray's In deepest consequence. -William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act I, Scene iii For something deeper, there is the classic Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life with a good summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Eve... The main point is that some people in how they present themselves to others, "in everyday life", put on an act something like in a stage play or play a role and where the act/role is not who they really are but, under the circumstances, to manipulate others.
• OoTheNigerian 12y ago
  To show how far tangential PG's position is to reality, there is a saying that goes "nice guys fish last". So much so that when a good person succeeds people go out of their way to mention "this is a good person that did not finish last. Of course, although I do not advocate meanness and I do not like mean people, the reality states otherwise.
• gfodor 12y ago
  I've worked with a few successful CEOs, some of which were 8-9 figure net worth, and one 10 figure net worth. One relatively consistent trait I've seen is that they all were brutally honest about the work people did and a person's particular strengths and weaknesses. This is often construed with meanness. I don't think it's the same trait, but many people often interpret criticism of their work as meanness. Sometimes it's quite hard to not see it that way, since an honest criticism may actually point out major flaws in your overall skills, talent, etc, not just some local error you made. Of course, the consensus forms that this person is an asshole. Unlike CEOs and other high level decision makers, most people do not face consequences if they do not call a spade a spade and risk offending others, so this makes it very easy for these types of brutally honest people to stand out as being unnecessarily critical. The net result often seems to be, however, better work out of the people who can take the heat, and a stronger overall team since the people who take criticism personally end up leaving. Overall I think I completely disagree with pg here, it seems the most incredibly successful people are at least perceived as mean, because they have a character trait which allows them to cut through bullshit and not care about hurting a person's feelings by giving objective criticism.
  • scobar 12y ago
    I agree with you that candor is often misinterpreted as meanness. You've described very well how a successful CEO who is perceived as mean because of candor may not be mean at all. So I don't understand why you completely disagree with pg about this topic.
• swasheck 12y ago
  came here expecting to see a discussion of how those who fall within the statistical mean of society (which dimensions?) have a higher-than-average failure rate (according to which measures)?
• zwischenzug 12y ago
  It's a nice essay, but the fact is that PG is no philosopher or historian. He treats "mean" as a known and monolithic entity that can be attached to individuals. "Mean" is a vague term that people might be sometimes, and not others. Sometimes being "mean" works to make you more successful. Was Bill Clinton mean? Richard Feynman? Dan Quayle? Gerard Depardieu? Baudrillard? Did they fail? Succeed? Reducing people to binaries of mean / not mean and successful / failures is absurdly reductive. Newton was a pretty mean thinker (in at least two senses) and is a good counter-example to some of these arguments.
• untilHellbanned 12y ago
  Coincidentally, I wrote this about cynicism a few weeks ago. Lots of same messages. https://medium.com/@timrpeterson/cynicism-21258dc48246 https://medium.com/@timrpeterson/cynicism-21258dc48246
• leroy_masochist 12y ago
  This is the first PG essay that I really strongly disagreed with upon reading. I don't think that anyone should aspire to being mean, but PG's arguments seem way off the mark. PG doesn't stop to define "mean", and from reading his essay, I infer that PG's "mean person" is someone who is insensitive to the feelings of others, abrasive, irascible, and who tends to turn disagreements into knock-down-drag-out-pick-a-side confrontations. I find it odd that PG thinks that people like this don't succeed, because I know quite a few people both within and outside of SV who fit this description to a T and are professionally successful. In fact, some (certainly not all) people who meet this description are GREAT PEOPLE. They're ornery and they don't suffer fools gladly; you're rolling the dice if you take them to a restaurant because they refuse to play the "I'm not going to say anything about the shitty service because I don't want to make a scene" game. That said, they're the first people you call when you need help with something serious, and they have your back even if doing so makes them lose social status. It's especially odd that PG wrote this because in one of his most famous essays [1], he recommends that you only hire "animals" as early employees. When I do a quick mental inventory of the animals I know, the majority of them have a bit of a mean streak. I would be in strong agreement with PG's essay if he defined "mean people" as those who derive pleasure or self-worth in putting down others. Those people are terrible, especially when they use passive-aggressive, plausibly deniable tactics to make other people feel bad. If there's one thing I've learned so far it's to break contact if I catch a whiff of that kind of toxic BS. Give me a productive mean person with a heart of gold over a tactful, toxic politician any day of the week. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
• nichochar 12y ago
  I think that the whole argument holds better if you replace the word fail with "do not become incredibly successful". I'm thinking of a whole realm of mean, arrogant, pretentious, often business oriented people who usually sell and don't create. And I wouldn't say they fail, they often do quite well. But to his point they don't become the best.
• vorg 12y ago
  > People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen. To create a society based on protection of property, the government must be mean to outsiders so it doesn't have to be to the insiders. When the government of a country with 4% of the world's population but 25% of the world's wealth enforces citizenship and residency rights (a form of property), then that's considered mean by the outsiders.
• evanwarfel 12y ago
  It's not so much that pg has a different definition of 'meanness', it's that he has a broader notion of 'success'. If we define successful as playing the capitalist game well, then sure, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison and others are all successful because they were sufficiently ruthless. Yet this too is selection bias, as there will surely be plenty of examples in the intersection of "people who don't fit pg's thesis" and "rewarded by society". There are, however, counter-examples: Warren Buffet comes to mind. Just because something is rewarded by society doesn't automatically mean it is good. In fact, if you can succeed at capitalism and not be a dick, seems to me that's an even rarer thing to do, and all the more respect for doing it. In light of the current state of society, it seems a good idea to re-examine what society happens to reward. We'll never know if Steve Jobs and others were/are truly happy. In fact, in a certain light, Jobs wasn't successful. For all his money, he happens to be rather dead. Who knows what truly great things he could have done after a successful battle with cancer. Every time Jobs is mentioned, until he fades from public view, people will talk about his storied career, his reinvention of Apple, his vision, etc. Everyone will also mention that he was an ass and died too young, because he couldn't get out of his own way and seek proper medical care soon enough. Given that we all operate in contemporary society, there is of course a place for being assertive and ruthless when one needs to. But PG / Ycombinator is starting to tweak his/their definition of success. In 200, 500 or 1000 years, will anyone remember Loopt? Not likely. But if a YC company successfully develops a fusion reactor the size of a shipping container, or successfully develops a cure for HIV/AIDS, and does something truly great, then YC will still be talked about for quite a long time. Much like how we still talk about Archimedes today.
• pbreit 12y ago
  I read this as "I hope Uber doesn't continue on its path to domination".
• michaelochurch 12y ago
  It's the other way around. Failure makes people mean. Success softens people and when they're relaxed, they can afford social polish, especially around important people like their investors. Of course, there are people who remain dickheads even after success (several were named here and I won't repeat) because they're either (a) so ambitious that they'll never have enough or (b) the meanness has become part of their "personal brands" but that's rare. Most people become more polished (and, superficially, nicer) when they're well-rested.
• clarebear 12y ago
  I find it more useful to see "mean" as a power dynamic than an emotion or character trait. If someone asks you to do something and you have a choice, it is not likely to seem mean. If someone asks you to do the same thing and you feel like you do not have a choice (because you work for them, or other reasons) it is much more likely to seem mean, especially if you don't think they are fit for the role of deciding things for you. If a parent holds down a screaming child during a shot, they are loving, but if a stranger does, it can be perceived as mean. If people perceive you as being mean, it likely means that you are invoking traditional power structures more often than other people perceive you should. Successful founders probably do better on both fronts: 1) not making people do stuff because they are the boss but getting them to internalize the underlying framework and pick the right answer themselves and 2) they probably have an easier time being perceived as a boss than average, so when they do force an issue, followers don't mind acquiescing. Given all that, this essay says people who are good at accumulating power organically do well in start ups. Successful minorities probably have to be super good at (1) because they likely take a hit on (2).
• metaphorm 12y ago
  PG may want to examine his own confirmation biases. "I am a nice person and I like to work with nice people. Therefore, when people I work with succeed it means that nice people succeed". That doesn't strike me as a universal truth. My own experience in the world has been that many incredibly mean and heartless people succeed, even in the "nice" tech startup scene. My own experience is hardly a proof, but it certainly gives me reason to suspect PG's perspective is a little off on this one.
• hoodoof 12y ago
  Maybe "mean people fail".... within the YC ecosystem, because it is so dependent on networking and relationships. Not so true in the wider software world.
• RockyMcNuts 12y ago
  You have to act nice when you’re the underdog. But being mean sometimes pays when you’re the big dog, and that’s when people show their true colors.
• deleted 12y ago
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• glomph 12y ago
  It is much easier to be nice when you are successful in the sense that you don't have to work as hard to benefit the people around you. Yet when it is actually measured (by which I mean more than just considering what you think of your wealthy friends) people who are less well off turn out to be much kinder. This has been measured and isn't speculative. But regardless of the evidence we can just appeal to how people actually behave. How many successful start up people are 'nice' or even good when considered against the world net and the potential they have. We all have the opportunity for radical redistribution, but the ridiculously wealthy even more so. To talk as if they are somehow nice because they help other people of similar privilege is in very poor taste. The remarks about needing safety come off as particularly horrid in the context of the vast wealth inequality the article is describing in such a joyful way. Like fuck do successful start up owners and investors need security more than someone working a temporary contract for minimum wage to support a larger family in worse conditions. They are the people that need security and safety.
• theyellownoon 12y ago
  There is something religious about this. Like in Calvinism where wealth is a sign of salvation. If you keep this belief it is important to remember that it is not the case that that everyone that fails is mean. Regarding the truth. It seems to me like the underlying claim that mean people fail is sadly false. However, it's likely that there are a lot of entrepreneurs that Paul and other investors turn down that get upset and fail for lack of support. I'm sure they aren't mean people in more favorable circumstances. Also, those that are funded generally are appreciative and nice.
• YuriNiyazov 12y ago
  The current top comment, and a lot of the discussion here seems to conflate "mean" with "rude" or "dick" or "evil" or "unethical", or "does illegal things", and from there we get things like "This essay is crap because Bill Gates (because of IE) is mean and successful". "Mean" has a very particular meaning. At least it seems to in this particular essay, if I may speak on behalf of PG regarding his use of it. He even hints at what it may be without explaining it directly: Children (especially children of PG's age - both under 7 or so, I believe), when fighting with or teasing or blaming each other, are not usually described as "dicks" or "evil" or "unethical", or even "rude". They are too young to have those properties ascribed to them. It is common, however, for children to call each other "mean" while fighting, and it is also common for parents to tell their children "don't be mean" (as opposed to "don't be a dick", which is what teenagers tell their friends, or "don't do illegal things", which is what courts tell everybody). So when PG uses "mean", he uses it to describe behavior in adult-ish YC founders that is isomorphic to little kids being bad.
  • bokonist 12y ago
    The dictionary defines "mean" as "Selfish in a petty way. Cruel, spiteful, or malicious." If you take the definition of mean to be "selfish or spiteful in a petty way", then yeah, most successful people are not mean. However, the operative word is petty. Most successful people avoid petty disputes. If this was the definition that PG was using, the essay would not have been worth writing. The explanation would be one sentence - successful people are not spiteful over petty things because it is not productive or efficient to wrapped up in petty things. So when I wrote my comment, I inferred from the rest of the essay that PG was using a broader definition, that defined "mean" as being "selfish or spiteful, about big or little things."
    • YuriNiyazov 12y ago
      Actually, I disagree with you about the "if PG was including the word 'petty' in his definition of mean, then this essay wouldn't have been worth writing" part. I bet PG sees a lot of petty fights in YC. I was certainly part of one. If there's one overarching theme to PG's essays, it's something like: "smart people that would otherwise be successful repeatedly do things that are obviously counter-productive." Note the obviously. Yes, it is obvious that it is not efficient to be wrapped up in petty things, and yet it happens over and over again.
• alexqgb 12y ago
  It's striking to see how many people rejecting pg's thesis seem not to have read it very carefully. His piece has a lot more nuance than the comments would lead you to believe. Specifically, he's referring to an emerging trend within a specific domain, making historical counter-examples - especially those drawn from other domains - hardly disproves the point. If you're one of those HN readers who habitually check the comments before deciding whether to read the piece, know that this normally reliable filter is not working here.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• efuquen 12y ago
  I've rarely met people he would be openly mean or hostile to others they consider their equal or above them. But watch how they treat people who they would perceive as beneath them and then you'll see if they really are an asshole or not. I'm just really surprised PG didn't even mention or think about the fact that founders just might seem so nice because that's they way they choose to present themselves with someone with as much renown as himself. If I was sincerely trying to think about this critically that's the first thing that would pop into my mind.
• iandanforth 12y ago
  The funny thing about this is that there are plenty of people who would call PG mean. He's famous for having no filters on his opinions so he's at least rude and if he thinks an idea is dumb he doesn't just say so, he will usually have an apt analogy as to how dumb it is. He gets away with this by being right more often than not. In contrast Jessica is nice. In fact she's super nice. Her criticisms are no less insightful but they are presented with careful (seemingly effortless) social grace. "Mean" though is a very imprecise term. I would much rather he use the phrase 'malice.' Or even better 'malice' and 'schadenfreude.' PG is mean in the way that the weather is mean, it can hurt if you're not prepared but it's not out to get you. And it's likely people interacting with PG are careful not to demonstrate malice or schadenfreude because he is someone they wan't to have a good opinion of them. Even given all that though, the basic thesis that successful people are somehow less likely to demonstrate fewer negative valence personality traits is born out by no research I know of. Here is some popular media coverage of the matter. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/drishtikone/2013/10/are-ceos-and-entrepreneurs-psychopaths-multiple-studies-say-yes/ http://www.patheos.com/blogs/drishtikone/2013/10/are-ceos-an...
• anateus 12y ago
  I wish this was true. I think what PG really means is "unpleasant people fail (more often than not)". Not being mean is generally construed to indicate you're kind. But PG didn't title this essay "kind people succeed". I understand the sentiment behind the essay, which is that the ones that succeed in the log term in tech are those that operate in mutually beneficial ways and encourage positive feedback loops. But I think conflating this with lack of meanness is a red herring. Edit: I should add that with "what PG really means" I don't intend to put words in his mouth. It is my potentially incorrect interpretation of his intent.
• koobz 12y ago
  His point about increasingly non zero-sum games reminds of a Steven Pinker talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk#t=890 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk#t=890 "Technology has increased the number of positive sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in by allowing the trade of goods, services and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of people." We still have a tendency to revert to meanness when resources become scarce - e.g. dwindling runways without forthcoming funding or competitors eating away at our market share. In many cases, It plays into the death spiral - visionary thinking, paced discovery and creative exploration of a problem space are replaced with short-term thinking, churn, frustration, and ultimately failure. In developed nations we've had the privilege of being able to take our time, spending at least 12 years of our lives educating ourselves instead of ploughing fields. Hans Rosling's talks get into this too: technology has allowed people to liberate time previously devoted to sustenance farming, washing clothes, 4 hour walks to the market. That time gets shifted to activities like education. There's a common them here of not letting our immediate needs overwhelm our ability to pursue goals that can dramatically change our lives and the world around us. Our opportunity is rare and the privileged position we have to pursue ideas can often be tenuous. In a way, if we don't hit escape velocity, we don't simply float, we crash. Meanness is a hack (one that doesn't even have an explanatory comment).
• peterwwillis 12y ago
  Um, what? Brutal dictators use 'meanness' to remain in power for decades. Pimps, drug dealers, gang leaders, etc. Violence and intimidation is an excellent tool for success. Going down a rung, you get political bosses, union leaders, etc. Powerful people are often mean in their dealings; they have to be. Being cold and calculating and using information to your advantage is one of the best ways to win a deal without using violence or intimidation. Down another rung you have CEOs and other multi-millionaires/billionaires. Does the name Rupert Murdoch ring a bell? Or how about the Koch Brothers? (sorry, I have a liberal bias; i'm sure there's plenty of liberal millionares who work the same way) There's even a paper that describes a tendency for higher-paid CEOs to treat regular employees worse: http://www.cps-news.com/wp-content/misc_pdfs/When_Executives_Rake_in_Millions.pdf http://www.cps-news.com/wp-content/misc_pdfs/When_Executives... Let's face it: capitalism is a cutthroat way of doing business. Competition is good for individual people, but the true purpose of a capitalist entity is to effectively crush its competition in a way that doesn't bring it negative attention. Even so, often corporations treat people like shit, covering up widespread abuse and getting away with it because it can afford to. Being mean is practically a requirement of any successful multinational corporation. As a final example: Wall Street. Tank a global economy, put people out of their homes, screw over businesses, all the while knowing what you're doing. You don't even have to serve jail time! Being mean pays. The better you are at it, the less consequences there are, too. Finally, being mean doesn't make you stupid. Being angry makes you stupid; that's been effectively proven. The heightened emotional state changes the way you think and reduces the ability to reason. But being mean doesn't mean you have a heightened emotional state; it basically just means you lack empathy or compassion. And you can still reason pretty well with a lack of empathy. Mean people don't fail. Stupid people fail.
• datashovel 12y ago
  I think there is strong evidence (based strictly on personal experience / insights) that "good" is a far more powerful force than "evil". I think "evil" can and does manifest itself in pockets of the globe, but overall in general if you re-ran the entire history of human civilization 1 million times, you would probably end up with a genuinely "good" outcome 80-90% of the time. And although it probably sounds like hocus-pocus to most people to be making this claim, I think there are intrinsic properties in what it means to be "good" that may even allow this hypothesis to be scientifically proven one day (that "good" is a more powerful force than "evil"). Some of the far more disturbing human behaviors to me are complacency and selfishness.
• regency 12y ago
  What about shallow apathetic people. HN is full of 'em.
• paulhauggis 12y ago
  "The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money" I disagree. Money is the lifeblood of any company. You need to be thinking about it at all times..or you will quickly find yourself in bankruptcy with a ton of debt. Startup founders shouldn't only be driven by money, yes. But money should be one of the main factors driving them to succeed. All of the ridiculous startup ideas I've seen were created by people that were not driven by money in any way and had no solid path to profitability (besides being purchased by a large company).
• danbmil99 12y ago
  At least one counter-example comes to mind. By most accounts, Steve Jobs was a pretty mean guy.
• Anchor 12y ago
  I think I agree with pg on this more than most here. To me, being mean means enjoying the suffering of others in itself (that is, without any other benefit). Most examples mentioned here refer to CEOs etc. who have been ruthless in their actions, but have benefited from it (financially and otherwise). They have not been mean in the sense that they would have done it even if it wouldn't have benefited them in other ways. I think this applies to Linus too, he may get so upset about the minor things that he, quite literally, verbally assaults people, but I don't think he enjoys being that upset.
• iolsantr 12y ago
  I think that pg's observation is probably perfectly valid. People who are mean to pg (and his peers) fail.
• abecedarius 12y ago
  The most successful people I know are all admirable. But their success took forms like CTO or director of research or influential programmer; when it comes to founders I have to go by reading about Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, the sort of accounts that suggest something like Entrepreneur Personality Disorder. I hope pg will follow up, because I'd genuinely like to understand his idea of meanness better.
• guest 12y ago
  In general, social science isn't very scientific. People generally just argue for what they believe, and use multi-syllabic words and some math occassionally to back up their arguments. "Mean" people tend to engender cults of personality. Cults of personality tend to focus on pleasing the leader rather than gettinf accurate reports through. As such, they can rarely organize enough accuracy to produce quality technical items. They can still 'succeed' on an uneven enough playing field. At the moment the playing field is massively tilted to make bets made by big players appear to be good ones at least until they get to the 'greatest fool' , currently the New York Stock Exchange. This process periodically corrects itself. It started to in 2008, but the Bush Administration replaced the helium in the bubble with more bubbles full of hydrogen. Maybe we can get up the cliff before they explode, maybe we can't.
• whitneyrzoller 12y ago
  pg could have done this thread a major service and defined the central term of his essay's thesis
• McKittrick 12y ago
  This is just silly. (and i don't mean that in a mean way...). Most people instances of perceived meanness are really just acting on a set of interests that don't align with your own. There's no malevolence involved, yet the perception is the actor is mean. Im quite sure Paul has in the past acted in a way that was perceived as mean by a non-aligned party, as have we all. Acting out of pure malevolence/meanness is different than that. That type of action is hopefully so rare that it is a terrible proxy for success/ failure.
• Mz 12y ago
  It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few. I imagine damn few people, especially in the tech startup world, are mean to pg or in front of him. He is too influential and his dislike of "assholes" is well known. So I imagine there is a certain amount of bias in his opinion here: Successful people aren't mean to him or in ways he would personally disapprove of. Of course, currying favor with him is one the things that helps lead to success in the tech startup world, so that bias no doubt runs both ways. As someone who is a demographic outlier on most fronts for hn, I have certainly had people here be mean to me, some of them quite successful, some of them quite popular here. I don't talk much about it in part because that's probably a good way to shoot myself in the foot. Attacking people here isn't going to make me more well-liked, popular or connected. Some of them did horribly cruel things in a way that made sure they had plausible deniability and I was the one who ended up looking bad. I mention that not to badmouth anyone, but as testimony that I have reason to believe, based on firsthand experience, that pg has a blind spot here.
• dredmorbius 12y ago
  Rather than read pg on this (his essay is a lot of wishful thinking backed by zero evidence), I'd suggest the master: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1232 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1232 "Is it better to be feared or loved" comes straight from old Nick.
• asdkl234890 12y ago
  People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen. It's quite a leap from Archimedes getting murdered to fear your ideas might be copied. Ideas can't be stolen. And if you really are motivated by wanting to make the world a better place, even copying your ideas shouldn't stop you. Peace and rule of law are necessary. Rent seeking with over powered copyright laws and patents, not so much.
• jriley 12y ago
  I attended a VC dinner event a few years ago. A networking session followed. I felt shut out of conversation by most of the "money" folks and a few aggressive MBAs. The only two polite people were 1) an open source developer and 2) a guy who turned out to be YC alum. Neither wanted anything from me, and both offered good advice. Perhaps it comes from the top. Thanks.
• ThomPete 12y ago
  I have worked with many great leaders and I have been a leader myself too. Being mean is mostly a matter of perspective. People with power, who need to make decisions that affect other people will almost by definition be seen as mean once their decisions affect other people negatively. Edwin Catmull spends a considerable amount of time talking about Steve Jobs in his book Creativity Inc. His main point about Steve was that he changed over the years and became more sensible to how his power and style affect others in other words he matured. The book has some examples of decisions Jobs did that positively affected thousands of people amongst others the merger with Disney again something you can only do when you are in a position of power. In that word is a plethora of nuances that one have to include when putting on predicates like this (arrogant is another widely imprecise term)
• crimsonalucard 12y ago
  Does PG ever consider the fact that people can be deceptive? A person you consider to be nice only appears to be nice. Whether that appearance correlates to the person actually being nice is a whole different story. I thought these facts were obvious. People can lie, have secrets and thus appear nice... This article has such a sheltered, naive view of the world.
  • prawn 12y ago
    Maybe it's more hopefully instructive than naive? I imagine informed by both his YC groups and raising young children?
• thebear 12y ago
  In my experience, successful people tend to be nice to those who can be of use to them and ruthless towards those with whom they compete. It seems to me that startup founders would almost always perceive Mr. Graham as someone who can be useful to them.
• rvn1045 12y ago
  Maybe the relationship between being mean and successful is the opposite? Being successful makes people less mean, because they are already successful and don't need to be mean. Bill Gates was known to be quite ruthless during his time at Microsoft, but he's changed that image of himself quite drastically.
• capex 12y ago
  > "I only know people who work in certain fields: startup founders, programmers, professors." This list is missing VCs.
• pillain 12y ago
  Mean is what we perceive to be a quality of a great leader. We spend half our adolescence dealing with mean people and mom says we will have to for the rest of our lives. We are built on the principle strive to be a better person, strive to be honest and truthful and strive to the best you can be but often we do nothing of the sort. We focus on the unnecessary and not on the real. I’m not sure if its intentional that there is a perception that mean is something that needs to be there to be successful or if mean is the bilateral issue created by the humans we are and perceive to be a part of a strong leader. It is not what we choose to become but who we are as a person that determines our success. Mean people do fail all the time morally and point proven they fail as founders too. We can continue to discuss what we think is mean but really we should be discussing character. Mean people will fail at least that’s how its supposed to work from a karma standpoint sadly it doesn’t happen. But as a founder, success does depend on the person you are and the environment and culture you create. Fighting is only a force but time and acceleration you are able to go the distance even from zero. That distance you create eventually leads to momentum, which then leads to transcendence. It is changing. For us improving the world is an advantage and for us having a moral standard is advantage. At this point we have an advantage do we become the mean people or the good people. Are we building good character or bad character? To overcome adversity create ingenuity that is unbelievable.
• sytelus 12y ago
  Doesn't it all depends on the domain you are working in? If you are artist, mathematician or academic researcher then you have don't have pressure to deliver something awesome in limited time or you die. In general businesses are game of survival of the fittest. Your competitors are always on move and you wake up every day hoping it's not your last as running company. You can't be startup founder with limited resource and also tolerate mediocre work or an employee. You can't butter up deficiencies and lack of progress. If you do what your competition can also do then it's most likely game over in few cycles. So you must demand 2X to 10X performance advantage in everything. This requires a certain degree of insistence and lower bounds on tolerance which would necessarily give rise to "meanness". This kind of environment seem necessitates ruthless people dictated by laws of evolution. However I think meanness are generally not intrinsic, i.e., person isn't mean because they are naturally mean. It comes out because of the pressure of this survival game. You make a bad hiring decision and you don't have option to not let go the person even if they moved across country for you and took on expensive mortgage and have 3 school going kids. If you came to know that a competitor is going to release a product 6 weeks before you do then you might not have an option other than everyone work their every waking hour, including Christmas. Your admin brought down site 3 times because of an error and being "nice" to him risks this happen 4th time. And so on... These are the stuff painters, mathematicians and scientists don't have to deal with every day.
• flipped_bit 12y ago
  This article intentionally or otherwise distorts how the real world really works even in the bubble of SV. The game in SV is more subtle - the meaness comes in different forms by silent exclusions, cliques forming to backstab other members and so on.... just like any other human enterprise. Add to this, the 'false humility', and self-deceptions, SV is actually way more narrow-minded than it used to be - very intolerant to anything that deviates from a certain expectations of conformity.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• bootload 12y ago
  "Ezra was so good to me." @holoway ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8676140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8676140
• ted5555 12y ago
  I have known successful people who aren't mean but in corporate America ruthlessness, callousness and near sociopathic behavior is rewarded. There is stupid internet meme that goes as follows: COO to CEO - what if we invest in our people and they leave? CEO to COO - what if we don't and they stay? Of course the real reply is CEO to COO - shouldn't we have fired them all by now?
• wellboy 12y ago
  Mean people succeed, good people succeed. Succeeding by being mean is pretty lame, everybody can do that. However, if you can succeed while still being good, then you are really talented, then you are a real founder at least in my book. There's not many of those, but there are a couple. I think startups have made it possible to create more good & successful people as they can become very successful very young, without being made ruthless by the business world over 10 or 20 years.