
The Pay-It-Forward Culture - websirnik
http://steveblank.com/2011/09/15/the-pay-it-forward-culture/
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JoachimSchipper
Open source fits "pay it forward" very well. I'm a little surprised that it
wasn't mentioned.

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icebraining
In fact, the GPL is a legal enforcement of the concept. Unlike the common
misconception, you're not obliged to give back your modifications to the
original dev - you're obliged to pay it forward by giving your users the same
rights you got.

(Whether this should be enforced legally is a different discussion, of course)

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0x12
Given the number of attempted GPL violations I think that the answer is 'yes',
it should be enforced legally.

Corporations would run roughshod over he rights of their users otherwise. The
GPL is one of the most creative uses of the copyright system ever.

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icebraining
I like what the GPL is trying to achieve, but frankly I dislike the
'collateral damage'; blocking proprietary software from using it is fine, but
it also blocks the non-copyleft licensed (MIT, BSD, Apache, etc) projects from
benefiting from the code.

In the OSS/Free Software world, GPL takes and never "gives back". I'm not
comfortable with that position.

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robjohnson
As someone who has only been in the software development culture for about two
years, I can firmly say that it truly has some incredibly helpful people.
People are always eager to help others (I.e. Stackoverflow, Lean startup
circle, etc) and interestingly enough, humility is more common than one would
expect from a group of absolute geniuses.

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padobson
'The goal of the club was: “Give to help others"'

Why don't we see more companies with goals like this? The "avoid the negative"
mottos are the popular thing in Silicon Valley these day (e.g. Google's "Don't
be evil" and Facebook's "Don't be lame"). It seems to me that avoiding evil or
lameness does very little to help you avoid other bad things.

A corporate motto like "Pay it Forward" or "Excite the Customer" or "Be
Entrepreneurs" or "Hack for Good" seems like one that would benefit a company
and the ecosystem it operates in much more.

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aplusbi
I like Noise Bridge's guiding principle: "Be excellent to each other." (which
is a quote from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure).

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jgrahamc
"They were the beginning of the Pay-It-Forward culture, the unspoken Valley
culture that believes "I was helped when I started out and now it’s my turn to
help others."

That's not how I interpret "pay it forward". I understood that to mean "I have
done a good deed to you, now you do a good deed for someone else".
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward>

The examples given are about mentoring and cooperation. Different, but heart
warming nonetheless.

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0x12
Those are the same things no? If you were helped out then someone did a good
deed to you, now you repay the favor by doing a good deed to someone else.

It's just 'out of phase' with respect to the starting point but otherwise
perfectly equivalent. Like a co-sine wave looks just like a sine wave...

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lutorm
_It's just 'out of phase'_

It's the phase that _makes_ it pay it _forward_ instead of backward. Obviously
in every interaction, at most one of the actors can pay it forward.

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0x12
I think it is just a viewpoint shift.

Whether you look at the two people that interact at one instant in time or at
one person at two different points in their lives the chain remains the same.

I've had plenty of help in the past and I'm giving plenty of help in the
present (as much as I can, which is still way too little). That means that for
me the 'pay it forward' mechanism is a very real component of my life.

Those that are on the receiving end are not under any obligation, other than a
moral one. And I'm pretty sure that for some of them the message is lost, but
every now and then the spark lights a new flame.

Pay it forward is an asynchronous mechanism, whether it actually worked or not
you can't even determine in most cases.

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dhimes
_Those that are on the receiving end are not under any obligation, other than
a moral one_

But that's the point. To pay first, you are operating under faith that this is
the right thing to do. To pay back after you have received is more like
settling a moral debt. For some people taking that leap of faith- doing good
before being guaranteed that there is something in it for them- is really
hard. They have what I consider to be a narrow and limited view of their self-
interest, and don't believe or understand that making the world better _is_ in
their self interest, if not obviously and directly so.

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euroclydon
I'm surprised there's no attempt to reconcile the notions of: secrecy,
competitive advantages and the corporate prime directive (to profit), with
information sharing like in the Semi Conductor Fab example.

I'm definitely not coming down on the other side of "pay-it-forward" and Steve
seems to invoke the "rising tide lifts all boats" idea with the Finland dinner
story, but surely there's a moral imperative not to spill the company beans.

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kragen
> surely there's a moral imperative not to spill the company beans.

Surely. And yet, you can't build something like Silicon Valley by erring on
the side of not spilling the company beans. You can only do it by sharing
information, which is also a moral imperative.

Fortunately, I've generally steered clear of that conflict myself, largely by
having the good fortune to work for Silicon Valley companies that absorbed
that ethic of openness. I've sometimes experienced that conflict, and in those
cases I've usually kept mum about things that could have helped our
competitors. Some of those things I still haven't talked about to this day,
because keeping my word is very important to me. But I respect the decisions
of other people who've chosen the opposite; I understand their reasoning, and
it makes sense.

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rmason
In Michigan there are two things that I have observed that are done
differently in Ann Arbor that have made it the states startup center:

1\. Strong support for entrepreneurs by the University of Michigan

2\. A pay it forward culture

I think any city that has both has a fighting chance.

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T_S_
I can't think of a better place that exemplifies this than Hacker Dojo in
Mountain View.

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sliverstorm
I had no idea Fairchild was the grandfather of so many companies.

