1) Zenefits having software tools to specifically skirt state laws about employee certification requirements
2) Theranos lying about clinical results
3) Nant misrepresenting order data to their shareholders
4) Uber having a set of formalized HR processes that facilitate the sexual harassment of female employees
all go beyond "naughty". Plus, I don't think that PG would be excited about the financial impacts that each of those behaviors have had on the respective companies' share prices if he were a shareholder in those companies.
That sounds plausible, but I suspect the correlation is very weak. Most people follow rules in a bizarrely idiosyncratic and context-sensitive fashion. For example, taking the escalator when going to the gym to use the stair-master.
What rules are fun to break?
There's a reason we love to watch crime dramas.
uber having a set of informal HR processes that fail to protect employees from persistent harassment
Is this publicly available information? First time I hear of it.
Being 23andMe selling accurate genetic information to their customers outside the purview of the FDA is being naughty. They could do it because the science was there.
In the case of Theranos, selling diagnostics that don't work is not being naughty. It isn't evading useless regulation. It is selling pseudoscience.
Unfortunately, many investors and the business press cannot tell the difference.
The thing that annoys me with Theranos was they could have found scientifically justified ways of significantly improving diagnostic efficiency but chose not to. Other startups are working on low-cost methods of providing lab tests in developing areas, without the pseudoscience.
The public/press distort and misreport all the time. There are plenty of reasons to be cautious there.
"If not, CHANCES ARE there is shadiness occurring".
I used this to nuance and to denote the fact that this is a rule of thumb, not one of the 10 commandments.
A [poor] analogy would be false precision. By stating something in overly specific terms we can communicate something completely opposite of what we mean.
In the case of something like "naughtiness" there's really no decent way to communicate what the author has in mind, not even in an approximate fashion. It's not reducible to a term divorced from the messy details of real-world context. And that presumes what the author has in mind is at all consistent. Better leave it unstated and leave one's actions to speak in their stead.
and what rules matter, is retrospective. I was a big proponent of Uber initially, I felt they were doing the right thing, but clearly they have gone down a path that I cannot condone.
You need to have a respect for the rule of law and the enforcement of contracts, otherwise, people won't do business with each other or trust one another.
You are up to shenanigans.
They are criminally corrupt.
The former exist in the service of the latter. One problem we have with contemporary US culture is condoning a sort of twisted narcissistic, psychopathic assertion that because competently breaking the rules is sometimes ethical, breaking the rules is a sign of competence.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_hum...
Theranos failed here big time.
So did Uber on the HR front at least.
"What We Look for in Founders
4. Naughtiness
Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter."