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So nice of pg to mention AirBnB as one of his examples of what a successful startup who "doesn't cheat" means. They just were great people with a great idea who found a market for something people wanted that no one had thought about before, and poof, exponential math billionaires who earned it! Of course, we'll ignore the huge issues that Airbnb created for cities, customers, and providers. We'll ignore the way they…
Does that work always without fail with anyone anywhere anytime?
And to the people criticizing, this is cheating. To them, a billion dollars enterprise is not possible without the exploitation of employees, customers, or at least the environment.
Also, the most important thing to understand about a society is how people gain status, not just money/wealth. If you focus on money, you won't have an explanation for political movements or artistic endeavors.
Holy smokes, one could call this condescending but assuming both politicians and an average reader don’t understand how exponents work feels a step above. And that’s before you get to the part where it’s all about a great idea and hard work and definitely zero exploitation while mentioning examples like Apple, Facebook or Airbnb.
In creative destruction, you can do an accounting sleight of hand by attributing credit for creation while ignoring blame for destruction even though the two are linked. This is a technology + investing forum and all of us agree that in general creative destruction processes are enormously net positive, but they frequently do kick off a toxic byproduct in the form of said destruction (e.g. Uber and displaced taxi dri…
I will say before Uber was a thing, if I tried to call and schedule a taxi pickup in the city I lived in at the time, if they showed up at all they were at east a half hour late. Missed a flight because of it once. I don’t even like uber, but it is objectively a better service most of the time.
We still want to encourage creative destruction to move forward, but paying taxes to clean up the destruction is the very least that the victorious parties can do because the entanglement exists in moral accounting even if it doesn't exist in financial accounting.
Maybe the politicians position is that the whole system is based on cheating and everyone who partakes is acting immorally?
Is it fair that the founder got education and some money to start his company while other people are living on the street or have to care for relatives? If they come from a relatively privileged position and manage to build a company that ends up being successful, did they earn that money?
I don’t think the cheating people criticize is necessarily criminal fraud.
Edit: and the second thing people seem to criticize is that just keeping your company growing often seems to involve some unethical things. Basically every company that’s manufacturing hardware is doing that in Asia under inhumane conditions, so they probably can’t really claim they earned their money and it’s just maths.
So nice of pg to mention AirBnB as one of his examples of what a successful startup who "doesn't cheat" means. They just were great people with a great idea who found a market for something people wanted that no one had thought about before, and poof, exponential math billionaires who earned it! Of course, we'll ignore the huge issues that Airbnb created for cities, customers, and providers. We'll ignore the way they…
Not exactly the way I interpreted it (emphasis on earn). Right or wrong, I think the vast majority of us think that "deserved money" is money earned from "work".
A simple example would be the billionaire Walton children: their fortunes inherited. Most people would argue that they did not really earn those billions of dollars.
On an admittedly slippery slope, for many, investing and other means where the money makes money is also not regarded as work (and therefore is not earned money).
To wave around the idea of "the American Dream", I suspect that many American's disapprove of any means of obtaining wealth that the average Joe or Jane are not privy to. This idea that you have to be born into money or have money to make money—we are (perhaps naturally) repugnant to.