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November 2014  
  
It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean.
There are exceptions, but remarkably few.  
  
Meanness isn't rare. In fact, one of the things the internet has shown us is
how mean people can be. A few decades ago, only famous people and professional
writers got to publish their opinions. Now everyone can, and we can all see
the long tail of meanness that had previously been hidden.  
  
And yet while there are clearly a lot of mean people out there, there are next
to none among the most successful people I know. What's going on here? Are
meanness and success inversely correlated?  
  
Part of what's going on, of course, is selection bias. I only know people who
work in certain fields: startup founders, programmers, professors. I'm willing
to believe that successful people in other fields are mean. Maybe successful
hedge fund managers are mean; I don't know enough to say. It seems quite
likely that most successful drug lords are mean. But there are at least big
chunks of the world that mean people don't rule, and that territory seems to
be growing.  
  
My wife and Y Combinator cofounder Jessica is one of those rare people who
have x-ray vision for character. Being married to her is like standing next to
an airport baggage scanner. She came to the startup world from investment
banking, and she has always been struck both by how consistently successful
startup founders turn out to be good people, and how consistently bad people
fail as startup founders.  
  
Why? I think there are several reasons. One is that being mean makes you
stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight,
because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of
the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big
ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet
fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems. Which is
particularly painful to someone who cares how their brain is used: your brain
goes fast but you get nowhere, like a car spinning its wheels.  
  
Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are
exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop
and fight.  
  
Another reason mean founders lose is that they can't get the best people to
work for them. They can hire people who will put up with them because they
need a job. But the best people have other options. A mean person can't
convince the best people to work for him unless he is super convincing. And
while having the best people helps any organization, it's critical for
startups.  
  
There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to build great
things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence. The startup founders
who end up richest are not the ones driven by money. The ones driven by money
take the big acquisition offer that nearly every successful startup gets en
route.  The ones who keep going are driven by something else. They may not
say so explicitly, but they're usually trying to improve the world. Which
means people with a desire to improve the world have a natural advantage.   
  
The exciting thing is that startups are not just one random type of work in
which meanness and success are inversely correlated. This kind of work is the
future.  
  
For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by
fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-
gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age
financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For
most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them
meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.  
  
That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum.
Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but
by having new ideas and building new things.   
  
There have long been games where you won by having new ideas. In the third
century BC, Archimedes won by doing that. At least until an invading Roman
army killed him. Which illustrates why this change is happening: for new ideas
to matter, you need a certain degree of civil order. And not just not being at
war. You also need to prevent the sort of economic violence that nineteenth
century magnates practiced against one another and communist countries
practiced against their citizens. People need to feel that what they create
can't be stolen.   
  
That has always been the case for thinkers, which is why this trend began with
them. When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless,
you get mathematicians and writers and artists. The exciting thing is that
their m.o. seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are
leaking into the real world, and this is reversing the historical polarity of
the relationship between meanness and success.  
  
So I'm really glad I stopped to think about this. Jessica and I have always
worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean. We tolerate noise and mess and
junk food, but not meanness. And now I have both an additional reason to crack
down on it, and an additional argument to use when I do: that being mean makes
you fail.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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