
Mean People Fail - grellas
http://paulgraham.com/mean.html
======
mattmanser
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.

~~~
paul
Do you actually know any of those people, or are you simply repeating media
noise?

~~~
defen
I had several interactions with the current <company> CEO back when they were
a very, very small operation, and while "asshole" might be too strong of a
word, I got a very strong "I don't give a shit about you beyond what you can
do for me" vibe. Does that qualify as "mean" as used in this essay? No idea.

Note: edited to remove identifying information.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I don't think it's fair to tell a story like that without strong evidence to
back it up.

Actually, telling it might be fine. Believing it, not so much.

I know how fashionable it is to hate on <company>, but is this what it's come
to? An unsubstantiated story about how someone felt "vibes"? When the CEO
didn't actually do anything?

~~~
douglasallen
How are his vibes less credible than Jessica's?

Judge a person not by how they treat their superiors (Jessica, Paul) but how
they treat those weaker than them, or those who can't do anything for them.

You are happy to take Paul's intuitions as data, but the intuitions of real
people NOT in a position of power, who interacted with this guy in a place
where he will show his true colors, you will dismiss.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I didn't say anything about Paul or Jessica.

------
AndrewKemendo
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.

~~~
btilly
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.

~~~
sfk
The price of _really_ valuable goods (housing, education, health care) is
steadily rising. Cheap trinkets in the form of silly websites, iPhones etc.
are just a distraction from the fact that the majority of the population is
worse off than 20 years ago.

~~~
btilly
According to
[http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MEHOINUSA672N](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MEHOINUSA672N)
the median US income adjusted for inflation is up over the last 20 years.

The median worldwide income is up a lot more, but I do not have an easy graph
for that.

~~~
vacri
Didn't you just say that 'money' is not the same as 'wealth'?

~~~
dredmorbius
Modulo a few not incontroversial assumptions, _inflation adjusted monetary
income_ is a proxy for real wealth.

The inflation adjustment is supposed to proxy for all the various utils your
dollars (or shekels or yuan or rupees) can buy.

In practice, most people will accept this at least for a base point of
argument as alternative measures tend to be even _more_ controversial. Even
those who have profound issues with money, price, value, inflation, wealth,
and more. Such as myself.

------
acjohnson55
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.

~~~
latch
This, and I suspect most people are smart enough to know they shouldn't be
mean around (and especially) towards him or his wife.

~~~
ape4
Sounds like pg needs to become an undercover employee to see the other side.
Try being an Uber driver.

~~~
yzzxy
Forget Uber driver, what about a code monkey at some YC startup? I've seen the
cable show "Undercover Boss" a handful of times and they manage to sneak in
company founders with some minimal, reasonable makeup techniques.

Imagine pg entering some RoR shop (or better, Clojure) and getting his code
reviewed by a CTO who's a few years out of college.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
Do you actually work at a RoR or Clojure shop, or are you speaking from "cable
show watching experience" ? Having worked at a number of such places in the
Valley, the number of times I've been told that I can't go home or to lunch or
whatever until such-and-such a thing is done has been zero.

Now, a finance startup in New York where the stack is Java and .NET?
Absolutely.

~~~
yzzxy
I meant it would be funny more from a technical perspective regarding his
history with Lisp and as something of a programming luminary, other commenters
appear to be talking more about brutal work schedules.

------
tacos
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.

~~~
heyts
I agree that the term mean is a very strange and relative term. 'Mean' is
ultimately dependent on personal views, in my opinion.

------
sillysaurus3
_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?

~~~
mafribe
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
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
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.

------
gfodor
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
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.

------
michaelmcmillan
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/...](http://www.wincent.com/a/about/wincent/weblog/archives/2007/07/a_look_back_bra.php)

[3] [http://paulgraham.com/good.html](http://paulgraham.com/good.html)

~~~
ema
Linus Torvalds is rude, not mean.

~~~
michaelmcmillan
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)

~~~
guiomie
Wow. I don't know what to think about this.

~~~
_almosnow
That you should read more than one byte at a time :(

------
no_future
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
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
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.

------
PaulAJ
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
Conclusion: Being mean doesn't pay, being ruthless does.

~~~
crimsonalucard
Isn't ruthlessness just a type of meanness?

------
Mz
_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.

------
trevelyan
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#C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_and_life_outcomes#Career_Outcomes)

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
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
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
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.

~~~
bokonist
Fair point. Using the word "mean" was a poor choice. There may still have been
essay worth writing, but it should have been called "Petty people fail." Or he
could have titled the essay "Assholes fail" and focused the argument on that.
Or he could have titled the essay "Bad/unethical people fail" and argued that
angle. But choosing "mean", which connotes both petty and asshole, makes the
argument much more unclear.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
But the argument isn't "Assholes fail" or "Petty people fail" (using human or,
not Boolean or). The argument is "Petty assholes fail", AKA "mean people".

------
lnanek2
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.

~~~
Htsthbjig
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.

~~~
sytelus
You probably don't have "smart creatives" that Eric Schmidt describes in his
latest book. If your company insist on hiring "smart creative" types who are
independent thinkers and intrinsically motivated then they would probably die
under constant supervision. They are best left alone with minimal intervention
if you want to get best out of them.

------
pptr1
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
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
> _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
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
> _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?

------
javajosh
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
Agreed!

Forgive me for descending to the trivial: it's 'its methods'.

------
timdellinger
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.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
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
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.

------
parfe
People aren't mean in front of millionare investor. Duh?

Steve jobs, bill gates, uber, dropbox, zygna. I guess those are all exception?

~~~
canremember
How was Dropbox mean?

~~~
rajacombinator
Yes please explain that one?

~~~
parfe
[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26987980](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26987980)

I moved to self hosted owncloud as a result.

~~~
jayvanguard
That isn't mean. Reprehensible, sure, but not mean.

~~~
diltonm
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)

~~~
jayvanguard
I suppose it depends on your political views. She was a core part of the
administration that invaded an entire country on false premises and resulted
in thousands of deaths.

Good point about the rest of her story though – she is a successful women and
came from statistically unlikely circumstances.

Tough to balance those things out. In my view the participation in war crimes
outweighs all other possible successes.

Edit: forgot to mention her role in authorizing torture.

~~~
diltonm
>> administration that invaded an entire country on false premises

"Clinton also stated that, while other countries also had weapons of mass
destruction, Hussein is in a different category because he has used such
weapons against his own people and against his neighbors."

[http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/](http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/)

"participation in war crimes"

Are you publicly accusing Condalizza Rice of war crimes? Do you have proof?
Does HN support your claims and are willing to fight a legal battle on your
behalf or testify in your defense?

~~~
cma
Aggression is a war crime. There is no chance of a meaningful legal battle;
the US has veto power in the UN and exempts itself from the world court.

(for example, the US was found guilty over Nicaragua and basically just
ignored it)

------
coldtea
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.

------
ebbv
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.

------
gvr
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

------
lmg643
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.

------
koobz
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).

------
SideburnsOfDoom
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)

------
glomph
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.

------
bokonist
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.

~~~
jenius
> 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.

This is simply not true. Many people see something that is wrong in the world
and genuinely want to make it better. I'm not talking about companies like
Uber that see how rich people just can't get private car quite conveniently
enough and want to make that better, I'm talking about people that see real
important problems and injustices and try to improve them, like Watsi for
example.

I'm sure that there are some people who just want to grab power and influence
and call it "trying to improve the world", but there are also people who
genuinely want to make the world a better place with no concern for money or
power and work tirelessly every day to do so. While sadly these people are
usually not well known, they are the real heroes.

~~~
bokonist
Let me clarify slightly - a desire to improve the world on a large scale (like
what a startup founder wants, which is what we are talking about) is
synonymous with a "lust for power." If a person only wants to improve the
world on their own small scale, like picking up after litterers or doing
community service, then obviously that is not a lust for power.

The definition of power is the ability to actualize ones will.

When we approve of what someone is doing, we call use the positive term, "they
are trying to change the world." When we disapprove, we say they are on a
power-trip. It's the same thing though. Since Watsi is small and their mission
is something that virtually everyone agrees with, everyone is unanimous that
they are "trying to change the world." But if you look at a larger charity,
that has more controversial missions, such as the Gates Foundation, you will
see a lot of people of accusing the foundation of being on a power trip, of
abusing their privileged position to play God with the lives of the poor and
weak.

There is a distinction between desiring money versus status versus
influence/power. There is also a distinction between being ambitious and
having ambition. The ambitious person has a vague sense they want to get ahead
or improve the world. The person who has ambition has an actual reality they
want to see realized. But there is not a distinction in motivations between
the person who wants to change the world versus the person who wants power.
The difference in terms comes from the outsider looking on, who will choose
the positive or pejorative term based on the consequences of the actions.

------
alexqgb
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.

------
timruffles
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
"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
If you are looking at your life holistically, money is only one factor in how
satisfied you are with your life.

------
Xcelerate
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.

------
jayshahtx
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.

------
stonogo
This headline may as well be "nobody is mean to the rich guy."

------
applecore
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.

------
graeme
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.)

------
aelaguiz
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).

------
graycat
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_Eve...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life)

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.

------
practicalpants
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
Now I am wondering if there is a correlation between mean people and cynicism.

------
rajacombinator
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.

------
evanwarfel
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.

------
robg
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-
Ameri...](http://www.amazon.com/Topsy-Startling-Crooked-Elephant-
American/dp/0802119042)

~~~
Agathos
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?

------
leroy_masochist
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)

------
maddalab
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

------
brianstorms
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.

------
anateus
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.

------
chacham15
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.

------
zwischenzug
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.

------
efuquen
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.

------
theyellownoon
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.

------
iandanforth
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-
an...](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/drishtikone/2013/10/are-ceos-and-
entrepreneurs-psychopaths-multiple-studies-say-yes/)

------
pillain
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.

------
metaphorm
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.

------
diminish
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.

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

------
clarebear
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).

------
guelo
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.

------
m52go
> 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
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.

------
sytelus
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.

------
codingdave
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.

------
mpatachi
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.

------
abecedarius
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
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.

------
jriley
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.

------
Hermel
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.

------
geofft
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?

~~~
rajacombinator
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
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?)

------
ThomPete
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)

------
snappy173
I think pg forgot that he is in the privileged position to be handing out
large sums of money to these people.

------
freshflowers
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.

------
datashovel
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.

------
zeeshanm
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
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.

------
jokoon
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.

------
softdev12
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-
som...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-some-
psychopaths-make-great-ceos/)

------
webwright
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".

------
thebear
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.

------
fasteo
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
In this context, willing to cause harm to others for your own gain.

~~~
fasteo
"mezquino" is the word then. Thanks

------
presty
> 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)?

------
s3nnyy
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))

------
Anchor
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.

------
JoseVigil
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.

------
Sakes
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.

------
peterwwillis
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...](http://www.cps-news.com/wp-
content/misc_pdfs/When_Executives_Rake_in_Millions.pdf)

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.

------
McKittrick
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.

------
grandalf
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.

------
slewis
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".

------
vincentchan
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."

------
flipped_bit
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.

------
wellboy
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.

------
VuongN
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".

------
flurie
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?

------
carsongross
"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.

------
vorg
> 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.

------
hoodoof
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.

------
asdkl234890
_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.

------
japhyr
> 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.

------
nichochar
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.

------
RockyMcNuts
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.

------
gct
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
wow, just wow.

what an incredibly over the top dick response

~~~
gct
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.

------
OoTheNigerian
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.

------
crimsonalucard
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
Maybe it's more hopefully instructive than naive? I imagine informed by both
his YC groups and raising young children?

------
ryguytilidie
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".

------
ted5555
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?

------
heyts
This seems apropos from what I remember of it:

\- [http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-
Industry/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-
Industry/dp/1594485755)

\-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYemnKEKx0c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYemnKEKx0c)

------
return0
Successful people have no reason and mentality to be mean, hence they are not.
They can also afford to be generous.

------
rvn1045
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.

------
dredmorbius
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.

------
leephillips
Woz is nice. Jobs was mean. We know who got more money. But I know whose hand
I'd rather shake.

------
xftp
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.

------
untilHellbanned
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)

------
jeeb_X
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.

------
bootload
"Ezra was so good to me." @holoway ~
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8676140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8676140)

------
bshimmin
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
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
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
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.

------
capex
> "I only know people who work in certain fields: startup founders,
> programmers, professors."

This list is missing VCs.

------
iolsantr
I think that pg's observation is probably perfectly valid. People who are mean
to pg (and his peers) fail.

------
whitneyrzoller
pg could have done this thread a major service and defined the central term of
his essay's thesis

------
danbmil99
At least one counter-example comes to mind. By most accounts, Steve Jobs was a
pretty mean guy.

------
no_future
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.

------
pbreit
I read this as "I hope Uber doesn't continue on its path to domination".

------
droptableusers
Perhaps they are just good at suppressing any inconvenient opinion or thought.

~~~
droptableusers
as demonstrated here

------
guiomie
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
But that's nonsense; there's no way to disprove PG's claim if you make it
untestable like that.

------
swasheck
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)?

------
MisterNegative
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.

------
Codhisattva
Kindness is it's own reward.

------
yatoomy
Dear, Larry Ellison...

------
d_luaz
it seems to me people here are pretty mean.

------
michaelochurch
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.

------
noobplusplus
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.

------
paulhauggis
"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).

------
regency
I take it Uber didn't get the memo.

------
tbarbugli
bullshit

