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Paul Graham: "Mean People Fail"

posted by LaminatorX on Monday December 01 2014, @04:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the Golden-Rule dept.

Freebirth Toad writes:

Paul Graham's latest essay posits that in the tech startup world, nice people finish first. He writes:

For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.

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. (Peter Thiel would point out that successful founders still get rich from controlling monopolies, just monopolies they create rather than ones they capture. And while this is largely true, it means a big change in the sort of person who wins.)

Putting asside that he hasn't really defined what "mean" is, is Graham right? Or is this just further evidence that his techno-utopianism has completely disconnected him from reality?

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Whoever on Monday December 01 2014, @04:25AM

    by Whoever (4524) on Monday December 01 2014, @04:25AM (#121398) Journal

    Was Steve Jobs mean? He disowned his daughter for years, was (by all accounts) an abusive boss. I think most people would think of him as successful.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @04:26AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @04:26AM (#121399)

    Steve Wozniak however, is by all accounts a nice guy.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @05:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @05:25AM (#121413)

      He may have lost out to Steve Jobs on fame and fortune for being too nice/geeky, but his obesity trumped Steve Jobs' alternative medicine.

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @07:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @07:05AM (#121434)

    He died of asscancer so he did fail in the end.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @07:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @07:19AM (#121438)

      I see what you did there. That's some funny shit.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @03:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @03:16PM (#121528)

    Bill Gates
    Steve Jobs
    Larry Ellison
    Jeff Bezos
    Larry Page

    These are *not* nice people. So yeah, I think Mr. Graham is wrong.