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.
I think you make an excellent point, but all these cases are examples of guys who got a seat on a rocket and were pretty ruthless about who else got to ride.
Which is to say, they're lottery ticket winners. And that's super, but it is a bad idea to model your personal finances on lottery ticket winners.
In the rest of the stupid world, with people who are just grinding it out day by day and not jousting with billionaires, being nice is a very, very, very good idea. Being nice keeps doors open. Being nice to everybody you can keeps a lot of doors open. You never know when your next deal, or next gig, or next hire is going to come from. I can't tell you how many times I have gotten a great opportunity (often years after the fact, or through a friend of a friend of a friend) through helping people out just to be nice.
You can't dictate luck, but you can absolutely put yourself in a position to be lucky. And the more times you can spin the wheel, the better off you are. Having people in your corner is a powerful influencer of this.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to finish a very profitable contract job that I got because I liked to hang out and drink beers with the drummer who lived next door a couple years back. (Who subsequently went on to become the head of marketing for a national firm. When hippies sell out, they go all the way.)
I agree with you. I think the complete opposite is true. Very few successful CEOs aren't assholes are at least on the higher end of aggressive and ruthless.
It could be what he intends by the word "mean" is more along the lines of petty and emotionally immature with aspects of small-minded vindictiveness. If so, I think what he is saying is true.
That style of "meanness" (think nasty little kid) is very difficult to hide and doesn't garner respect. Aggressive ruthlessness does unfortunately, at least among the types of people that are followers.
I think you and pg are talking past each other. Here's the first sentence of his essay:
"It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean."
There's probably a disconnect between the most successful people pg knows personally, and the handful of tech CEO's you know only from reputation. I'm willing to bet not even pg knows (or knew) Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison personally. Who does he know?
"I only know people who work in certain fields: startup founders, programmers, professors."
There are hundreds of successful startup founders, and you can name seven mean ones over the course of almost 50 years. I'm sure if we worked together we could come up with a few more, but it's a small, countable number. Y Combinator probably funds around seven successful startups every year, and that's not even counting the programmers and professors. I'm willing to bet PG's experience outstrips anything that you or I know purely from reputation.
Plus, I think some of your examples actually support pg's argument. Take Uber, for instance. The technical implementation of Uber is trivial. What enables Uber to survive is their ability to pick and win political fights with the taxi cartels, which is exactly the kind of place where pg would expect mean people to succeed. Oracle and Microsoft won, not based on technical merit but based on enterprise sales and deal-making.
I agree with most of your points, but I don't think you went far enough.
From the moment we are born we do damage; all of us. Even your kindest most respected role model will step on a bug, unknowingly, just when going for a walk. And people do know they're doing this so it is being 'mean' if you're the bug.
Take your counter example pg. He is the business of excluding people which is actually pretty mean when you consider the damage path. The operating mechanics behind this very forum, designed intentionally by pg, are considerably mean, but of course all of this will depend on who you are and where you sit relative to any action taken by any given person.
> For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands...
History is littered with examples how gaining control was simply a matter of: ownership, negotiating, venturing through difficult terrain or access points, or even plain old racing to be the first person there and establishing a stronghold.
The word 'stronghold' is interesting. It implies force, yet often does not require any. Where one person might use the world 'stronghold' another might use 'establishment'. HN is an establishment. It maintains its strong hold on high quality content from its users via mean practices like hell banning over trivial things like not agreeing with it's owners or because of some relative interpretation of meanness held solely by its owners.
>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.
Maybe the problem with this PG's post is that he did not define the term "mean".
I did noticed the pattern: people which have very little empathy have batter chance to succeed as startup founders. Which means that they will inflict harm to other people without any remorse if that make business sense. And they will be extra nice to people with more money then them.
So being mean in order to promote your business is called "being ruthless", "growth hacking", "efficient manager", etc. Being mean without any reason is just stupid and, ... really really mean.
Also there are plenty of successful founders which do have a lot of empathy and they are successful.
> 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.
I would be very interested if you could elaborate on the specifics of "the billions of damage he caused humanity" and "held the internet back for 6 or 7 years", these seem like rather extraordinary claims.
Most of CEOs you listed are of the biggest companies selling in the very competitive markets. It means that they succeeded because, in the first place, they were able to fight off competition. I don't think PG thinks about this kind of activity when he writes about startups. He writes that the amount of wealth is unlimited [0] so acquiring this kind of wealth actually does not involve "stealing" it from others. If you exclude the top and non-innovative companies I think that what PG writes about is true.
Yeah, his definition of mean clearly doesn't involve superficially charming sociopaths and narcissists. As long as the person can look attractive and chat personably during a dinner, or out for drinks, or be the center of attention at a meeting they're 'nice' and not 'mean'. Never mind the fact the whole time they're talking to you they're taking notes on where to slip the dagger in your back should that ever become necessary. I think his wife's x-ray vision is necessarily quite a bit off.
A member of my family is a retired psychologist who has treated many CEOs during his career. He once told me that "in [his] experience, most CEOs are sociopaths."
And here's the detail: "Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to work for them. They can hire people who will put up with them because they need a job. But the best people have other options""
Yes, Steve Jobs was very mean sometimes. But he also knew how to praise, he also knew how to identify and motivate talent.
And of course, it's one thing to be a startup founder, another one to begin seeing money in the bank. That changes things usually.
> 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.
That's 7 years less of internet and technological perspective he gets to experience in his mortal life, if that's actually the case.
It depends on what you think is more valuable. Are you working in tech for tech? Or are you working in tech to make money? Just because these people made a lot of money, doesn't make them totally knowledgeable about all tech.
I think as long as you give ideas openly, you get ideas back. You teach people about tech, you learn about tech back. People who get greedy are fucking themselves in one way or another. With all that fame, independence, and achievement comes a lot of opportunity to miss developing a sense of humility, social connection, and interpersonal growth.
But, I think there is a cautious difference we must make here. There is a difference between meanness, and the attempt to make fair judgments - diplomacy. The position of a person who has to decide the fate of their company and the effects that has cascading down human generations on technology and human growth in general, is not in an easy position to be in. If these were simple problems, we would see simple answers.
It is easy to look back at people's decisions in retrospect and criticize. It's hard to make those decisions when you are actually there. It's hard to empathize with people that seem like assholes, but I wonder if they have difficult empathizing with themselves. We get to see a sliver of who these people are, and that sliver is distorted through a chorus of echoes across culture.
Re: Sophistry - the key here is to look at the usage of the word "mean" when it is applied to kids fighting. When kids are being mean to each other in a fight, the opposite of them being mean is "good" and "benevolent".
"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."
You're absolutely right. Think of all the billions of dollars that Gates donated to AIDS research, cancer research, vaccinations, etc. But no matter how many lives he saves, he'll never be able to make up the fact that he held back the internet for 6 or 7 years.
The definition seems to involve being unsuccessful and/or purposelessly damaging to others. But sociopaths are not generally sadists; hurting others isn't the point, it's a side-effect.
Do you believe that competition is inherently "mean"? If you choose not to compete at your highest level and in turn are out-competed, what did you accomplish?
> 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.
Of course this is a weird post. I think he wanted focus on the aspects of flattery involved in praising technology. You are providing counter-examples to a theory where his evidence is "my friends aren't assholes", which, while surely true, has a potential confound he doesn't discuss, and "people YC likes do better than those that we don't like", which isn't surprising for a SV power nexus.
I don't know if it's a cultural difference or what else but your examples of meanness don't fit my definition at all.
To me being mean is to inflict harm on others without any personal gain, just for the sake of harming.
That said most of your examples were indeed harmful but also had a clear personal or corporate goal, which in my eyes makes them not-mean (I'm not talking about ones you didn't give any example, since it's hard to discuss them).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[+] [-] mattmanser|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] warcher|11 years ago|reply
Which is to say, they're lottery ticket winners. And that's super, but it is a bad idea to model your personal finances on lottery ticket winners.
In the rest of the stupid world, with people who are just grinding it out day by day and not jousting with billionaires, being nice is a very, very, very good idea. Being nice keeps doors open. Being nice to everybody you can keeps a lot of doors open. You never know when your next deal, or next gig, or next hire is going to come from. I can't tell you how many times I have gotten a great opportunity (often years after the fact, or through a friend of a friend of a friend) through helping people out just to be nice.
You can't dictate luck, but you can absolutely put yourself in a position to be lucky. And the more times you can spin the wheel, the better off you are. Having people in your corner is a powerful influencer of this.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to finish a very profitable contract job that I got because I liked to hang out and drink beers with the drummer who lived next door a couple years back. (Who subsequently went on to become the head of marketing for a national firm. When hippies sell out, they go all the way.)
[+] [-] jayvanguard|11 years ago|reply
It could be what he intends by the word "mean" is more along the lines of petty and emotionally immature with aspects of small-minded vindictiveness. If so, I think what he is saying is true.
That style of "meanness" (think nasty little kid) is very difficult to hide and doesn't garner respect. Aggressive ruthlessness does unfortunately, at least among the types of people that are followers.
[+] [-] philwelch|11 years ago|reply
"It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean."
There's probably a disconnect between the most successful people pg knows personally, and the handful of tech CEO's you know only from reputation. I'm willing to bet not even pg knows (or knew) Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison personally. Who does he know?
"I only know people who work in certain fields: startup founders, programmers, professors."
There are hundreds of successful startup founders, and you can name seven mean ones over the course of almost 50 years. I'm sure if we worked together we could come up with a few more, but it's a small, countable number. Y Combinator probably funds around seven successful startups every year, and that's not even counting the programmers and professors. I'm willing to bet PG's experience outstrips anything that you or I know purely from reputation.
Plus, I think some of your examples actually support pg's argument. Take Uber, for instance. The technical implementation of Uber is trivial. What enables Uber to survive is their ability to pick and win political fights with the taxi cartels, which is exactly the kind of place where pg would expect mean people to succeed. Oracle and Microsoft won, not based on technical merit but based on enterprise sales and deal-making.
[+] [-] i4cu|11 years ago|reply
Take your counter example pg. He is the business of excluding people which is actually pretty mean when you consider the damage path. The operating mechanics behind this very forum, designed intentionally by pg, are considerably mean, but of course all of this will depend on who you are and where you sit relative to any action taken by any given person.
> For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands...
History is littered with examples how gaining control was simply a matter of: ownership, negotiating, venturing through difficult terrain or access points, or even plain old racing to be the first person there and establishing a stronghold.
The word 'stronghold' is interesting. It implies force, yet often does not require any. Where one person might use the world 'stronghold' another might use 'establishment'. HN is an establishment. It maintains its strong hold on high quality content from its users via mean practices like hell banning over trivial things like not agreeing with it's owners or because of some relative interpretation of meanness held solely by its owners.
[+] [-] hnnewguy|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tlogan|11 years ago|reply
I did noticed the pattern: people which have very little empathy have batter chance to succeed as startup founders. Which means that they will inflict harm to other people without any remorse if that make business sense. And they will be extra nice to people with more money then them.
So being mean in order to promote your business is called "being ruthless", "growth hacking", "efficient manager", etc. Being mean without any reason is just stupid and, ... really really mean.
Also there are plenty of successful founders which do have a lot of empathy and they are successful.
[+] [-] mistermann|11 years ago|reply
I would be very interested if you could elaborate on the specifics of "the billions of damage he caused humanity" and "held the internet back for 6 or 7 years", these seem like rather extraordinary claims.
[+] [-] paul|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aartur|11 years ago|reply
[0] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
[+] [-] lamontcg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfmercer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmount|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|11 years ago|reply
Yes, Steve Jobs was very mean sometimes. But he also knew how to praise, he also knew how to identify and motivate talent.
And of course, it's one thing to be a startup founder, another one to begin seeing money in the bank. That changes things usually.
[+] [-] drcomputer|11 years ago|reply
That's 7 years less of internet and technological perspective he gets to experience in his mortal life, if that's actually the case.
It depends on what you think is more valuable. Are you working in tech for tech? Or are you working in tech to make money? Just because these people made a lot of money, doesn't make them totally knowledgeable about all tech.
I think as long as you give ideas openly, you get ideas back. You teach people about tech, you learn about tech back. People who get greedy are fucking themselves in one way or another. With all that fame, independence, and achievement comes a lot of opportunity to miss developing a sense of humility, social connection, and interpersonal growth.
But, I think there is a cautious difference we must make here. There is a difference between meanness, and the attempt to make fair judgments - diplomacy. The position of a person who has to decide the fate of their company and the effects that has cascading down human generations on technology and human growth in general, is not in an easy position to be in. If these were simple problems, we would see simple answers.
It is easy to look back at people's decisions in retrospect and criticize. It's hard to make those decisions when you are actually there. It's hard to empathize with people that seem like assholes, but I wonder if they have difficult empathizing with themselves. We get to see a sliver of who these people are, and that sliver is distorted through a chorus of echoes across culture.
[+] [-] YuriNiyazov|11 years ago|reply
My full comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674961
[+] [-] akshatpradhan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meowface|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnaritas|11 years ago|reply
No he will not and cannot. No amount of good deeds to people X makes up for destroying people Y.
I agree, this is a bizarre essay.
[+] [-] no_future|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] legohead|11 years ago|reply
For the rest of us, it's pretty obvious that successful people are mean, for the most part. Here's a simple example: politicians.
[+] [-] UberB|11 years ago|reply
You're absolutely right. Think of all the billions of dollars that Gates donated to AIDS research, cancer research, vaccinations, etc. But no matter how many lives he saves, he'll never be able to make up the fact that he held back the internet for 6 or 7 years.
[+] [-] foobarqux|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onewaystreet|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawkice|11 years ago|reply
Of course this is a weird post. I think he wanted focus on the aspects of flattery involved in praising technology. You are providing counter-examples to a theory where his evidence is "my friends aren't assholes", which, while surely true, has a potential confound he doesn't discuss, and "people YC likes do better than those that we don't like", which isn't surprising for a SV power nexus.
[+] [-] fludlight|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nakedrobot2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mszyndel|11 years ago|reply
To me being mean is to inflict harm on others without any personal gain, just for the sake of harming.
That said most of your examples were indeed harmful but also had a clear personal or corporate goal, which in my eyes makes them not-mean (I'm not talking about ones you didn't give any example, since it's hard to discuss them).
[+] [-] SteveJS|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] acjohnson55|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tacos|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|11 years ago|reply
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
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?
[+] [-] gfodor|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] michaelmcmillan|11 years ago|reply
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
[2] http://www.wincent.com/a/about/wincent/weblog/archives/2007/...
[3] http://paulgraham.com/good.html
[+] [-] no_future|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PaulAJ|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Mz|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] trevelyan|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] YuriNiyazov|11 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] lnanek2|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pptr1|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] javajosh|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] timdellinger|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parfe|11 years ago|reply
Steve jobs, bill gates, uber, dropbox, zygna. I guess those are all exception?
[+] [-] coldtea|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ebbv|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gvr|11 years ago|reply
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