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His problem was being a horny brat. I am pretty confident Hot or Not would not have passed muster with Jessica Livingston.
Also even if he had shown Paul Graham the earliest Facebook numbers, the partner panel could very well just say those numbers were faked, which the Friendster people purely out of spite would say, and what would they do, call a college freshman about how much she uses Facebook?
PG was cheering lambda school's free 4 weeks developer intern trial a while ago. If he doesn't think that is exploitative, maybe huge difference in morality. Airbnb spamming forums early on, sketchy marketing techniques, avoiding commercial regulations that hotel has to go through for good reasons and displacing genuine local rent seekers is not exploitative then maybe the bar is high enough for YC. Should the founde…
> Mark Zuckerberg wanted to engage online with his college friends. His problem was being a horny brat. I am pretty confident Hot or Not would not have passed muster with Jessica Livingston. Also even if he had shown Paul Graham the earliest Facebook numbers, the partner panel could very well just say those numbers were faked, which the Friendster people purely out of spite would say, and what would they do, call a c…
I'm curious about advice folks would give for remote YC final interviews vs in person ones?
One mistake pg makes here is assuming that to be an exploitative billionaire you have to be good at exploiting people or have personal manipulative qualities. You don’t. Owning a large company in a capitalist system is inherently exploitative. Simply owning a large company and taking surplus value from a large number of people is exploitation.
Who are these large number of people? Customers or suppliers? In socialism, customers are usually held captive because of limited suppliers. In capitalism, suppliers are usually held captive because of fierce competition to get customers. Neither sounds inherent exploitation by the entrepreneur.
PG was cheering lambda school's free 4 weeks developer intern trial a while ago. If he doesn't think that is exploitative, maybe huge difference in morality. Airbnb spamming forums early on, sketchy marketing techniques, avoiding commercial regulations that hotel has to go through for good reasons and displacing genuine local rent seekers is not exploitative then maybe the bar is high enough for YC. Should the founde…
Airbnb feels like a very bad example. It’s rich people renting out their homes to other rich people. You’re saying that’s more exploitative than rich people renting out those same homes to poor people? How do you think that really pans out?
Many people took loans to buy airbnb to aggressively rent them. Criminal activity go through roof with tourists in the neighborhood. You don't know who your neighbors are because they keep changing. It doesn't feel safe to let your 10 year old son out for many.
Drugs, garbage on the road, covid hot spots. Hotels also have to pay taxes which airbnb avoids. Price in the area goes up for locals. People move out to surrounding areas and have to commute more.
off-topic: I have been actively participating in HN since 2010, and recently I started seeing prominent tech people on twitter backlash against pg. Not sure if It was there before, or if I'm barely noticing this. i.e. many of them show screenshots of getting banned by pg on twitter. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1329094570056032264
pg has fallen out of touch. The world is very different for the young ones. I’m not old but my tech career started back around 2007. It was very different. Back then tech was exciting and new. We were changing the world. Now we have changed the world. Mobile is king, web is emperor. We’ve won. Tech is to 2020 what finance was to 1980. And VCs are seen as the big baddies. People don’t join this industry for the love o…
Any statement that has the word "only" in it is guaranteed to be wrong. I wonder if PG worded it this way intentionally (straw man fallacy).
Most people agree early employees should get more equity. This doesn't address whether startup founders are hoarding equity for themselves and their investors instead of fairly rewarding early employees.
> the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people
needs to be revised to a keener straw-man in your very next paragraph:
> the key to becoming a billionaire — the defining feature of billionaires — was to exploit people
Here he's swapping necessary-but-not-sufficient for definitionally-equal-to.
For many, this is a hard pill to swallow. Here's one way to judge it more objectively. Replace "billionaire", with something more neutral: "pro basketball player", "amazing musician", "prolific writer".
The arguments tend to make a lot of sense in other categories, but our natural inclination rebels on Billionaire. This is a great sign that something is off