
Interview with Paul Graham - rmason
https://thepolitic.org/an-interview-with-paul-graham-founder-of-y-combinator/
======
flexie
"The exit “tax” seems the most alarming to me. Though it’s called a tax, it’s
really just confiscation. And if you look at the other countries in history
that have confiscated the property of people who tried to leave, it’s not
company you’d want to be in"

\- Denmark currently has what is in effect an exit tax on rich people. It's a
complicated tax and changed all the time in order to dodge EU requirements on
the freedom of movement between EU countries.

PG probably wouldn't want to be in Denmark since after all he exchanged chilly
and grey England with warm and sunny California, but Denmark is hardly among
the worst places in the world in which to live or do business.

~~~
aguyfromnb
> _Though it’s called a tax, it’s really just confiscation._

After all, they _earned_ their money through hard work alone, with no help
from the infrastructure, education system and social policies of the country.
And now that they have an ungodly pile of it, they should be able to take it
to whichever _new_ country will require them to give back the least, and stop
contributing to the country that made them rich.

~~~
nickpp
Yes, they earned their money legally. And yes, they already paid tax on said
money in the country they earned them.

Those are the only two facts that should matter. The rest is just snark.

~~~
ianleeclark
> And yes, they already paid tax on said money in the country they earned
> them.

I think the point that exit-tax proponents are attempting to make is that the
current social understanding of wealth is that wealth-holders tend to show
that they are capable of efficiently allocating resources, so they should be
able to continue to do so while they're still in the country, thus we tax them
lower than we would if we could more efficiently use those resources. So think
of it like a partial taxation or a conditional subsidy alongside a future
promise of additional, likely greater, taxation from their future business
dealings, job creations, &c.

Since they're leaving, the country is losing out any investment it assumed at
an earlier date when deciding to tax less, so the country would effectively
just be reclaiming a conditional subsidy.

~~~
nickpp
Funny enough, people leaving a country do not necessarily want to cut out all
investments in said country. Just reside (and pay income taxes) elsewhere.
Original country could still reap benefits of the existing investments there.

This is one of the reasons exit tax has failed miserably around the world: it
prevented good business people doing business in punitive countries in the
first place.

~~~
mnsc
> This is one of the reasons exit tax has failed miserably around the world:
> it prevented good business people doing business in punitive countries in
> the first place.

You have to define the "good" in "good business people". If you are a global
scale entrepreneur planning to start a business and looking for country with
an educated workforce that has good infrastructure but you need to be able to
take your gathered wealth when the business is mature (read you have an
obscene amount of wealth) in order to find cheaper less educated workforce to
keep up operations in order to generate more wealth for yourself. Then you are
a "good" businessman only in the sense that you are good at maximizing your
own pile of gold. Morally you are bankrupt. So what does a "punitive" country
loose by not letting you reap the benefits of a "high taxes system" for your
own personal gains?

~~~
nickpp
So by your logic an employee who only maximizes his "pile of gold" (salary)
and is morally bankrupt and should be punitively taxed?!

What should he do, not sleep at night thinking about "the good of the company"
to be a "good employee"?!

~~~
mnsc
"punitively taxed" is your words not mine. And yes a employee who reap
benefits from taxes but acts in a way to evade taxes is acting in a morally
bad way. However, an employee has very limited ways of evading taxes and
pressuring countries to change their taxation system to fit his/her idea of
what is "good" whereas people at the top of the pyramid are very "good" at
doing this.

------
the_watcher
> a new Lisp dialect written in itself called Bel (2019).

Is this accurate? I thought it was a spec for a new Lisp?

~~~
drcode
He wrote an implementation too, but he hasn't released it yet because he says
it's too alpha for now.

BTW, I'm like the world's biggest fan of PG's Lisp work, but given that the
bel spec doesn't have an efficient association data type in 2020, I find it
completely impossible to take it seriously. (This is speaking as someone who
wrote a production app in arc that is still in use)

~~~
the_watcher
Got it, thanks!

------
liqla
To some extent, the pie fallacy exists. But if your major life work is Viaweb
(which was really worthless and sold during the bubble to Yahoo contacts),
perhaps you should not talk about pies.

There are a huge number of Open Source contributors here who have produced way
more wealth than Graham.

~~~
nickpp
Paul Graham's major life work (so far) looks to be YC, not Viaweb.

~~~
akp10
The pivotal work (with _rtm_ and _trevorj_!) was Viaweb. Without that he would
not have been able to start YC.

Also I presume he had substantial help in starting YC.

Many successful people like Bechtolsheim and Khosla go into the VC business.
Still these two would probably list Sun as their major work.

The OSS contributor comment still applies: In the technology business one
would need to go into the league of companies like Intel to even start
comparing the wealth generated by companies vs. the wealth generated by OSS.

~~~
jannotti
I mean, he had to learn to read too. If not for that, he'd never have founded
viaweb!

True, but not very interesting.

I happen to think both were fairly innovative. Both viaweb and YC were at the
forefront of a newish idea that seems pretty obvious in retrospect: Server
based applications, and startup incubators. Both existed before to some
extent, but pg recognized their value pretty quickly, and did them both well
enough to make an impact. (I'd learn toward more credit incubators and less
for server-based apps, but whatever.)

~~~
alqwlsq
I think you are rewriting history. Viaweb was selling shovels (enable small
businesses to generate websites) Ycombinator is selling shovels (enable people
to launch startups, initially for an outrageously low investment).

Selling shovels was one of the fundamental concepts during the first bubble,
nothing new.

Webshops were nothing new either.

His innovation was turning startups into movement, largely using this website
and blog about it so tirelessly (always using the term "startup") that he is
credited with the concept.

~~~
jannotti
Viaweb was founded in 1995 and sold in 1998. It WAS part of the first bubble.
And no, people were not routinely writing web server based "applications" in
1995. They were, at best, making some early websites. Also nobody was thinking
of pages as screens in an app powered by server based software. OpenMarket, I
suppose.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Market](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Market)

But they were only founded in 1994.

------
PouyaL
Quite like the phrase on inequality "Perhaps the reason the pie fallacy is so
prevalent is that it’s in our DNA."

~~~
goto11
Its a fallacy to call it a fallacy though. Sure, many forms of wealth is not
zero sum, but some are. For example political influence correlate with wealth
and _is_ basically zero-sum. So larger economic inequality concentrate power
among fewer people. This is pretty significant whether you consider it a good
or a bad thing.

------
baron_harkonnen
Does PG earnestly believe that the critique of income inequality and
capitalistic exploitation in general is really "everyone should get a fair
piece of pie!"?

I have a hard time believing a Harvard PhD and rapid support of capitalism has
never encountered a critique of the topic outside of a third grader's
worldview.

~~~
hef19898
The one poit I dont quite get is the connection between economic inequality
and "noone should support founders". The one has nothing to do with the other,
you can support founders and support initiatives to decrease economic
inequality at the same time.

Generally, i don't like the view that there is nothing between radical
capitalism on the one side and stalinist communism on the other. And that
everything that is not 100% "true capitalism" is automatically socialism hich
is, by the above logic, stalinism style communism. Every European country
prooves otherwise.

~~~
andyjpb
The article draws heavily from his essays and both the questions and answers
assume a good familiarity with them.

In at least one of his essays he argues that founding a company creates wealth
and wealth creation does two things.

1) Makes society as a whole better off. i.e. "A rising tide lifts all boats",
so the poorest in society benefit as well as the richest. The mean value of
all individual's wealth increases.

2) Increases inequality because the distance between richest and poorest
increases. The variance in individual's wealth across the population
increases.

Of course, these are just arguments he puts forth. Others may disagree with
them. ...but I think it's worth trying to understand the distinction he makes
between "inequality", "wealth creation" and "improving society as a whole".

~~~
hef19898
Actually I came accross PG's essays before I discovered YC. Historically I
think he's right. Even the poorest ones in today's western world are still
better of in most aspects than most of the richest ones back in, say, the 16th
and 17th and even 18th century. Easily.

He even once wrote, no idea in which essays, that he would prefer to be poor
in an advanced society to be rich in an non-advanced one (something along
these lines). Now, as we know that automation and software are enabling
companies, and their investors / founders (with VCs investors more than
founders IMHO), to create a lot of whealth that is not very well distributed
across society. Which we see every day. So, working from his earlier statement
on which society he would rather life in had he the choice, I assume PG has
some level of understanding about the social realities. He is now also in a
position to actually do something about it, him being arguably very rich and
influential in his own way.

And what is he doing? Arguing against taxes for the rich to make life easier
for the poor, against reducing the economic and social distribution and
faisness in society. Because, according to him as far as I understood his
later essays, as long as everybody can be enabled to found a company that
problem will go away. Which it will not, not everyone can start one,
regardless of access to capital. And even then most of the return will end up
in the hands of the rich investor class with founders being more often than
not cogs in the system.

Call the opposite approch socialism if you want, but if we as a socuiety don't
think about these issues, hard, we will end up in deep trouble. Not just in
the US where these problems are way more extreme than in Europe. I'm just way
beyond believing that rich people will voluntarily do something about the poor
if it would cost them a single dime.

------
tabtab
Re: _Interestingly, though, this policy shows how quickly socialism turns into
authoritarianism._

That's a slippery-slope fallacy. Anything can "slip" further. If you claim X
is more slippery than Y, you need to provide solid evidence.

I'd rather hear his opinion on start-ups and technology rather than politics.

------
ones_and_zeros
Since I follow paulg on twitter I don't have to read the article to know where
this is going. On twitter paulg is a "capitalist idealogue" (a term someone
else used to describe him which I thought fit very well). and that comes with
all sorts of controversial points of view.

The most entertaining/snarky way I can describe it is he is a try hard
auditioning for the role of Peter Thiel's best friend.

It's a little disappointing considering the regard I held for him for so long.
I try to separate the essays from the twitter account.

------
quantumwoke
Quite a diverse range of topics for pg from politics to epidemiology.
Interesting to see that juxtaposition between his ultra-capitalist viewpoints
with his isolationist stance on coronavirus. The latter comes across to me as
a little out of touch with both the disease and his risk factors compared to
the general population. To me the wealthy retired have a responsibility to be
educated yet critical on current events such as coronavirus.

------
patrec
> But on the other hand, I’m one of the few people who can say heterodox
> things without worrying about getting fired. So if I don’t say these things,
> who will?

Has Paul Graham ever made use of this freedom?

~~~
krapp
I haven't read every essay he's written, but to me it seems like his
"heterodoxy" is relatively weak. He won't be fired for his opinions but he's
not going to risk his reputation by doing something _actually_ controversial,
like denouncing capitalism or calling out the racism and misogyny in his own
industry.

~~~
patrec
This is was my impression as well, hence asking. I dimly recall him getting
zinged by some fringe enforcer group once or twice, but not because what he
was saying was genuinely heterodox, simply to tighten the overtone window a
bit on that side.

I agree with him that financial independence and a bully pulpit give one
freedom and, as a public spirited person at least, responsibility to make use
of that freedom to voice otherwise supressed opinions that merit some airing
(whether correct or not). If he's actually doing it, it would certainly
enhance my opinion of him.

------
piker
Interesting to see PG worrying about coronavirus. Otherwise somewhat of a
bizarre series of interview questions, including asking him to opine on
seemingly random quotes. Perhaps there is some non-obvious context.

~~~
celticninja
Perhaps to push the post YC depression post off the top spot?

[https://www.bmaho.com/articles/post-yc-
depression](https://www.bmaho.com/articles/post-yc-depression)

------
dangus
It seems like Paul Graham is being asked a bunch of questions not at all
related to his field of expertise.

I point out once again that the only reason he’s on the front page here is his
association with YC. He often has nothing revelatory to say and yet he’s on
here due to the cult of personality.

Every time I mention this it stirs up controversy which in itself kind of
proves my point. People want to hear what this dude says because they
fantasize about the pure-luck impossibility selling a company to Yahoo! years
ago and getting to spend the rest of your life as a semi-retired wealthy man
with ample time to write essays.

~~~
earthtourist
I find Paul Graham to stand out even among the smartest people whose work I
follow. He's prone to regular and incredible insights. Like a great stand up
comedian, he frequently notices things most of us manage to miss. He has his
blind spots and faults, of course, like every human ever.

And there is truth to the charge that his current popularity is inflated due
to him being an investor. Many investors receive an undeserved amount of
attention and adulation. After all, their entire job is to hand out millions
of dollars. That tends to incline people towards paying attention.

But I, along with many thousands of others, have been reading Paul Graham's
essays since long before YC. That's how he launched YC (and Reddit, and Hacker
News). This is proof that he was genuinely compelling long before he was an
investor.

His Lisp books were also great. So he was a successful book author, successful
founder, successful essayist, then a successful investor. Not an example of
someone failing upwards, as is disappointingly-common in The Valley.

~~~
nwienert
I’ve read most of his stuff and find him to be no more compelling than just
about anyone. He just packages it all up and puts it out there. But his foot-
in-mouth ratio is also really high and he often tweets or writes about the
most banal things as though he were discovering new physics.

~~~
gist
I actually don't fault him (despite my other comments) for writing about 'the
most banal things' I put that on the person who is reading that thinks it's
more than it is. And seem to celebrate it.

Likewise I remember when someone wrote (don't remember who) how they thought
it was great that the janitor put a supply of plastic trash can liners at the
bottom of the trash can so they'd be there in supply when needed (and when the
trash was emptied by taking the existing filled bag). This is something I had
done myself forever. Just seemed obvious. So it's more "what's the big deal
why are you making like the janitor has figured out some really ingenious
trick'"?

Also the other thing that I would guess bothers people is when they say the
same things it would get no notice at all (from friends or in an online
comment). So it's more like 'why is this guy getting attention and I am not
for these simple thoughts'? (This might have been parodied on SNL as 'deep
thoughts by Jack Handy' iirc.

~~~
shadowprofile77
Just to briefly note, the trashcan liner storage thing is actually a bad idea
if done like that. The reason why? Sometimes because of defects or rips caused
by sharper pieces of trash, followed by kitchen/bathroom liquids accumulating
in the same bag as its used, said bag leaks. Having stored the reserve bags
inside the same can beneath it, you're now left with a leaky, full garbage bag
that soaked not only the easy to clean can but also all the other folded bags,
which is a more tedious sort of mess. Better to keep them nearby in a
guaranteed dry place.

------
yodsanklai
> Soon I’m going to have to say enough is enough, and push the coronavirus
> into a corner of my mind so I can have room to think about other things
> again.

I'm in the same boat. I'm not particularly worried about the coronavirus, but
I spent too many hours discussing and looking for information.

------
dntbnmpls
It felt less like a real interview and more like a pre-arranged/pre-planned
"message".

> Why do so many even well-educated people think in zero-sum terms if all they
> need to do is separate the idea of money from material wealth?

Because many well-educated honest people know that wealth = power and power is
a zero sum game. It's the well-educated dishonest people who keep insisting
everyone focus on the superficial non-zero sum nature of wealth and ignore the
zero-sum consequences of wealth in relation to power.

If that interview room was the world and PG and the interviewer were the only
people in the world and they produced 1 handgun and 1 nerf gun, they increased
wealth. But that increased wealth is meaningless isn't it? What's important is
who gets the handgun and who gets the nerf gun because it affects the power
relation in the room and power is zero sum. If PG gained power, then the
interviewer necessarily loses power. And vice versa.

Historically, it's always those with wealth/power who insists everyone look at
the non-zero sum nature of wealth. A king or a slave owner says to a serf or a
slave that increased wealth is good for everyone. Of course the king and slave
owner would take greater portion of the wealth which increases their relative
power over the serf or the slave. It's the same dynamic in north korea or with
a pimp and a prostitute. Even if the greater wealth in north korea slightly
benefits the poor, it still leaves them worse off vis-a-vis "dear leader" who
takes a greater share of the wealth. Nevermind that if the percentages were
reversed ( people get the lions share and "dear leader" gets a smaller slice
), the wealth would still have increased. But PG would probably say that's
unfair or confiscation.

> Though it’s called a tax, it’s really just confiscation.

All taxes are confiscations then.

> Interestingly, though, this policy shows how quickly socialism turns into
> authoritarianism.

And there you have it. The agenda. Also, it's not like capitalism hasn't
confiscated either? Entire continents of land was confiscated by capitalism.
Entire races of people's labor was confiscated by capitalism. Wars have been
started, governments overthrown and resources stolen in the name of
capitalism.

> But on the other hand, I’m one of the few people who can say heterodox
> things without worrying about getting fired.

Or banned.

> So if I don’t say these things, who will?

Nothing in the interview was "heterodox". What heterodox statements has PG
made?

> The top idea in my mind right now, to be honest, is Covid-19.

Was wondering why there has been a sudden surge of covid-19 posts lately.

Frankly, this is why podcast interviews are so popular and tv/mag/etc
interviews are not. There is no genuine free-flow exchange of ideas or
honesty. It's just pre-arranged robotic soul-less talking points. It's the
interview equivalent of the potemkin village. It has the fake facade of an
interview, but there is no real interview.

~~~
hef19898
Oh, capitalism turned to authoritarianism often enough. And confiscates enougj
as well, e.g. land for air raft production of coal mining in Germany. Not sure
why the US is so scared about social agendas.

------
DrNuke
I think the point here is as soon as any “guru” is brought out of his / her
superior and acknowledged niche expertise, the universal, human frailty
prevails and coronavirus is the plague of today. Keep well, folks (and every
man for himself).

~~~
thundergolfer
Didn’t Charlie Munger say something apt like:

“I’m smart in spots, and I stay around those spots.”

