Balzac probably isn't wrong. You need at least one ruthless motherfucker on the team if you want to get dirty, shitty wealthy. Somebody has to be focused on the money; otherwise, nobody is.

I'd also postulate that a complete ignorance of money probably isn't ultimately productive to your goals. You can't work on your business without distractions if you're getting evicted, for example. (This is assuming you're not generationally wealthy.)

“If I’ve learned one thing in this life, it’s that when it’s millions of dollars at stake: you keep your head down, your nose clean, and work twice as hard as the other guy. But when it’s billions of dollars?

The only thing that matters is never, ever saying no.”

Cue Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones

pg had too much success too quickly for it to be chance (IMHO).

Leaving Viaweb aside (Yahoo was buying all kinds of stuff back then so it’s hard to know how cool-headed finance would have valued it) he clearly saw and exploited a massive opportunity around technology investment. And it’s worth bearing in mind that he drove several of the first few monster batches through an overall market meltdown that had a lot of VCs saying it was the end of the world.

There was a definite luck factor called the iPhone: someone was going to build an army of businesses on the back of a platform revolution like that, but he got there first and executed.

Now the public good component is a more complicated story, I honestly don’t know if replacing one club of secret-handshaking insiders who routinely fail up with a different one is a net win, and I certainly don’t buy the argument that you can measure it by market cap, but at least the new club doesn’t care who your parents are I guess? I think it’s probably a win vs. an admittedly abysmal bar.

I’ve thought about this comment a lot since you wrote it. I’m reminded of Bill Gross, “the bond king,” who founded PIMCO. Skilled, wanting to win at all costs, but who built a strategy primarily for a declining interest rate macro (“structural alpha”).

I’m not ignoring the varying degrees of skill, education, and intelligence. I’m emphasizing the luck required for all that to be effective.

Great comment, appreciate the history lesson and teachable moment.

I’m flattered that you got value from my comment, I think it’s just stuff people my age ended up watching: I think I joined HN in like 2007/2008 and that’s when pg’s essays were still considered radical and no YC company had IPO’d for zillions yet.

It was a very cool time!

> “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."

This quote reflects a very European attitude towards wealth to me. I believe PG specifically talks about possible origins of this idea.

An Orleanist interpretation of this aphorism is as credible as Louise-Phillip's claim to the French throne. Vautrin derives this statement from a near endless litany of examples. I would strongly recommend reading Balzac to get to the origins of all this.

You can share all the true examples you want. But 19th century France and 20th century America have completely different economic models. So we can't understand that purely by studying French literature.

A truly horrible take, and sadly pessimistic.

Balzac's pronouncement assumes the world is zero-sum; ie that wealth must be stolen from others. While that may have been true of many fortunes for many centuries on earth, it is not true now. The essence of Silicon Valley is the positive-sum game. Paul's at the heart of it.

Paul has done a lot of good for a lot of people, including the founders who went through YC, which is why people pay attention to his opinions.

Giving $10k out to each founding team in the first year of YC wasn't laundering luck into status. (I doubt he cares about status.) It was changing how tech investing worked in order to liberate more tech people to recombine with each other in order to work on hard problems.

> Balzac's pronouncement assumes the world is zero-sum; ie that wealth must be stolen from others

Not stolen, but it really pays to be super-ruthless towards your competition and everyone around you really. Just look at Microsoft's history.

Some people succeed that way. Others succeed with a lot of creativity and hard work.

They may eventually face competition, and then sure, you have to compete.

To say every great fortune stems from a great crime is self-limiting at best, at worst the germ of socialism.

There aren't many great fortunes, they usually require dominating an industry (say, come to be one of top 5 vendors out of industry that initially had 10,000 competitors), and I think it's pretty unrealistic to believe you could dominate an industry without getting your hands dirty. There may be exceptions like Warren Buffet, but I think the dark path is much more common.

This is simply untrue. The number of great fortunes itself has vastly increased in tech's positive-sum economy. The increase in the number of multi-millionaires, and the growth of that class, has been deeply impacted by tech. And it's not just founders. Lots of execs and senior software engineers now possess fortunes that past ages would have considered great, even in real vs nominal dollars.

Not all industries are winner take all. And many industries remain to be invented by founders.

This fortune == crime is part of a scarcity mindset, and it's a shame that limits people.