I think what we missed is that there would be two tiers of email senders, differentiated by price. There would be $100/MM email senders that would appeal to spammers, and $500/MM senders that would appeal to companies that manage their communications well. They’d have different delivery rates through spam filters. The bottom tier is bad for the world and a low-margin business. The top tier is OK for the world and a profitable business. SendGrid seems to have found the sweet spot.

The purpose of y-combinator is not to make tons of money, neither should that be the default purpose of a company. "Business ethics" is a thing.

Y Combinator does not strike me as particularly concerned with ethics.

Hmm, really?

In a capitalist society (such as we live in, like it or not), we express value in money. IF your company isn't making money, is it adding value? If people aren't willing to pay for it, is it actually any use to them?

The notable example for this is Facebook. We don't pay for it. Advertisers do. That shows where the value is...

Phillip Morris makes money, where’s its value add?

I smoked for 20 years. I loved driving with a Marlboro Light hanging out of the window. I chose to do that to my body from my own free will, and willingly paid to do it. I'm glad I stopped, but I enjoyed it while I did it.

Things that are bad for you can still be valuable. I still willingly buy beer, even though I know it's bad for me.

Value isn't what you think it is, if you think that smoking provides no value.

Saying that value is expressed in dollars is not the same as saying that dollars are the only thing a company should ever seek. That's not how it works.

If every company sought only money for money's sake and did nothing else, then they would all act like Oracle.

> In a capitalist society (such as we live in, like it or not), we express value in money. IF your company isn't making money, is it adding value?

Yes, but it's a very imperfect way to capture value.

Without legal support, it doesn't account for negative externalities - eg, if your factory saves money by dumping waste into a stream, making people sick (but you don't pay for that). Or your site gets visitors by sending spam, wasting the time of the recipients and everyone who works trying to filter spam (but you don't pay for that).

It doesn't account for things consumers don't have the foresight to care about, or don't have options to choose between. Eg companies that manufacture a fridge that will last 10 years and be unrepairable may make more profit than those who would make one that lasts 50 years and be repairable, because they'll sell more product. Planned obsolescence wastes resources, but is profitable.

It also doesn't account for the value of things like raising children. If I play for my own children for 2 hours, that's not part of GDP, but if I pay someone else to, it is.

And it doesn't account for the fact that people's desires and priorities are warped. Child pimps generate revenue, whereas the social workers rescuing kids from them do not.

obviously you don't like living in a capitalist society, then.

Fair call, good stuff. I hope you manage to change the world to your liking.

Meanwhile, in a capitalist society (such as we live in, which you clearly don't like), we express value in money.

I never said that. It's not perfect, but I far prefer living in a capitalist society to a centrally-planned economy, which I think can never work.

The game of capitalism requires referees. Otherwise, robbery is an excellent business model.

That, I completely agree with. Unfortunately we have a habit of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted... people are much quicker at inventing ways of abusing the money system than the regulators are at stopping them.

I'd like to demonstrate my point of view about money=value with a story, if you don't mind reading a bit:

When I was in my late 20's I was earning a lot of money working on a software project that was doomed to failure. Everyone on the project knew it was doomed, but it was politically infeasible for the current management to pull it or deal with the fact that it was going to fail. So every day, our little team of very expensive contractors wrote a bunch of code that we knew was never going to be tested, let alone run on real server. We all collected our pay and waited for the project to be canned.

During this time, I met a nurse randomly one night. We ended up walking around town talking. She had just got off shift at a local hospital, saving people's lives. She got paid about 10% of what I did. The ridiculousness of me getting paid 10x more than her, when I was producing nothing of any value, while she was saving lives, was stark, and it has always stuck with me. It seems like such an obvious mis-allocation of funds, a failure of the economy.

But in a larger sense, building the Internet (by which I mean our global networked computer-based infrastructure) is the thing that Humanity is engaged in at the moment. When they write the history of our time, it will be all about the Rise of the Internet. Creation of public health services, on the other hand, was the thing we did last century. So in that sense, it's easy to see why our profession is highly paid, even if the small-scale project we're working on right now is doomed. We are doing the most important thing on the planet right now, and everything else is merely background noise to that effort (at the moment, this will change).

All this is a long-winded way of saying that seeing emergent behaviour from inside the thing is much harder than seeing it from the outside. To us, this all looks like random bullshit and injustice. But zoomed-out, from a historical perspective, it makes more sense. Still not perfect, but at least coherent. The individual injustices and weird nonsense get smoothed out, and it looks like everyone had a plan all along.

Myspace

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Friendster

Are just some of the social sites whose founders were all spammers.

There are more but i forget some.

From one spammer to another then.

What makes you assume YC has no ethical basis for investment?

Their expansion to China.

Are you using Slack, Uber, Docker etc.? Because if yes, then you're not the most ethical either, as these have investors from Saudi Arabia to the CIA. China is easy to pick on, (and am not saying it shouldn't be picked on), because it is a competitor to the U.S, however if it is such an ethical concern for you, there are earlier partnerships you should be concerned about.

China is easy to pick on because it's the greatest evil the world is facing today. There are plenty of other shitholes around the world, but only China is capable of forcing almost every country and company into their submission.

Also, there's a big difference between using a free product and working for a company that supports China/Saudi Arabia/etc. Or in YC's case, bringing billions of dollars worth of investment into a country that sends Muslims to concentration camps, and helping them build a dystopian surveillance state that will force everyone to spread their propaganda and fall in line; while being completely helpless as hundreds of millions of lives are destroyed..

That being said, I do try to avoid using products of unethical companies, and I would resign without a second's hesitation if I found out my company was involved with these evil governments.

> China is easy to pick on because it's the greatest evil the world is facing today.

Not really a big fan of China, but lets be a bit more consistent here.

China is in the middle of an empire-building enterprise and like every such enterprise, (UK, Russia, United States), does many awful things. Yet compared to some places in the Middle East, I don't think it's nearly as evil. Certainly not "the greatest evil the world is facing today", (the only way I can see that is if you think U.S. global supremacy is great).

Personally, I'd argue the greatest evil the world is facing today is people in power ignoring climate change.

> only China is capable of forcing almost every country and company into their submission

You must have missed the war in Yemen, as an example.

> there's a big difference between using a free product and working for a company that supports China/Saudi Arabia/etc.

How so? The products I mentioned are not free software for the most part, by using the product, (even their "free" plan), you're supporting the company China/Saudi Arabia invests in and thus supporting these governments economically.

> bringing billions of dollars worth of investment into a country that sends Muslims to concentration camps

As I said, that's really a case against empire building and a case I agree with, however it's been done by every empire. Similar things have happened at black sites in Iraq etc. so I think the consistent line to take is to be against investing in any empire in that case, which would include YC's home turf.

> I would resign without a second's hesitation if I found out my company was involved with these evil governments

That is a great stance, however the cynic in me thinks they probably already are in some way, even if you don't know it.

I recall Nike was using it.