Success is about achievement far in excess of the average. When a change is massive, it usually hurts someone. Sometimes things that seem really positive, like facebook helping kids stay in touch, contain massive negatives, like amplifying polarization in society.
That's why we need to evaluate these things with more nuance. Just because Google's search engine is a massive boon to internet users doesn't mean none of their businesses should ever be regulated. Just because Uber's culture is misogynist doesn't mean taxi licensing is great policy.
And if you succeed in doing something massive, remember that it isn't permanently good, and doesn't make you permanently good.
..with Facebook's mass surveillance and manipulation apparatus.
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. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
I'd think most people would say something that seems like cronyism is an unwritten rule of what not to do. Yet that's a [big] part of Sam's legacy, no? Of course I'm assuming things about the Loopt acquisition, but it never did look right.
And the googlepleasehire.me[1][2] guy was their VP Marketing through this ordeal. So maybe google does make some good hiring decisions after all[3].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/03/google-please-hire-matthew...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840233
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2011/09/07/google-fails-to-hire-the-g...
I know plenty of people who "get off the ground" by playing by the rules. I'd love for you to re-read your comment again and tell me that it doesn't sound dogmatic.
But it’s generally true. Find me a billion dollar company started by someone who follows all the rules.
What rules did companies like Atlassian not follow?
Maybe draw the restriction back a bit, there.
That being said, when you get that big, of course there's problems. You have targets on your back, you're managing thousands of people, etc. Especially if you're entering into a market with regulations... someone is going to fight back.
This looks like a clear case of fraud. lying to investors and regulators. That isn't a "growth problem" from having a target on your back, its a legal/cultural/approach issue that probably existed from the start and grew large enough to bite you in the ass.
such is life
And I wonder how much the SEC spent in manpower to arrive at this outcome. I can't really remember the last time any of their enforcement actions ended up as anything significant.
Laws are just there to compress the variance of outcomes. Where as in the past you would've starved, today you just struggle to get by.
Any examination of sociology, anthropology, and history shows a rich, long history of humans helping each other through peril, banding together in the toughest of times, and cooperating. It is by far our most recognizable trait as a species, and it appears in isolation whenever humans are together. I do not buy that there is some primitive animal culture that we will revert to if the Internet went down. There are humans who have never experienced "civilization", and they do not live in chaos and evil so I don't buy your argument at all.
Also, that $5B valuation is based on significant expectations of future growth. Their customers up to now are probably the low-hanging fruit of the market - tech companies whose culture embraces tools like Slack. To grow beyond that (e.g., to Fortune 500 companies), they may need to offer a significantly different product that's sold in a very different way. Or, those companies may not want such a product at all.
They can easily do what Facebook or Oracle did and just buy up any competitions with their huge warchest.
http://www.businessinsider.com/all-the-companies-that-ever-t...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833815
and is writing a book about it:
If we were to look at only the lack of negative outcomes, a "company" that has 14 users that like the service would be a greater success than, e.g. Facebook, which isn't really how we use the "success" in conversation.
A lot of people in this world, as you can see on most threads on this site, define "good" as "financially successful,” and care only about getting a piece of the action. In that regard, it doesn't matter if it's legal, quasi-legal, a shitty scam or any permutation (see ICO's) if you see yourself as smart enough to get rich from it.
It really doesn't. There is a very narrow set of circumstances that would aversely affect your place in society based on how you earned it.
Just think about how often it actually comes up regarding the wealthier people you may know or have heard about. Your wealthier neighbor.
Odds are you never dug for all the civil litigation they encountered, or the relative morality behind each case or circumstance.
They are just wealthier and society will reward them for that in perpetuity with access to better housing, better schools, better healthcare, and even more capital. End of discussion.
I'm not saying there aren't a number of advantages to being wealthy, there certainly are.
Peter Thiel. The Bushes. Bill Gates. George Soros. Warren Buffett. IBM. Bayer.
Edit: Do you have a point?
they received $583,000,000 and an amazing valuation by LYING. They would have received exactly $0 by not being so compelling.
they pay $1,000,000
they still get to be a unicorn success story that everyone aspires for. deal
Snapchat has a negative P/E ratio. In other words they are hemorraging money.
I can't speak as much to Spotify and Lyft, but I don't remember them being very profitable either. Or at least profitable enough to warrant their valuations.
You can probably replace Microsoft with Apple or Google without much trouble too (but it's trivial for Microsoft).
Both already had some toxic people near the beginning of their time. I'd say that makes them a toxic company from the get go too. You can't say the same thing for a ton of other companies. In these cases we didn't need to give much time at all. I think that's an important distinction.
Doing anything in the real world is hard. Some military sayings come to mind:
"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
"Sometimes, a 90 percent solution now is better than a 100 percent solution later." (Meaning you could all be dead if you dick around looking for something too fussily perfect.)
"You got to break a few eggs to make an omelet." (This is a saying about training deaths. They happen. Get over it. It is worse to not train them or to make training too sissified and safe and not enough like actual battle conditions.)
Something startups do is the they take people who may have very little experience at the senior level and thrust them up there into the limelight. That is contrasted with people who come up through the ranks of a large company, adjusting along the way to the norms of corporate behavior and the company's notion of right and wrong.
I am fascinated by the lack of repercussions for investors. I had thought GroupOn and Zynga would have taught people the risks but no such luck.