Paul GrahamVerified account

"Building a startup is like Someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down" @reidhoffman So here is what i have to ask, how can ethics/being fair be your priority while falling of a cliff? Imo this analogy is normalising the lack ethics in startups cc @paulg

In practice, the additional stress of starting a startup doesn't cause otherwise ethical people to behave unethically.

It's curious that substantially no one worries that someone's ethics will necessarily slide while getting married, having kids, doing a medical residency, or competing in elite sporting events, but it is widely believed that startup stress possesses some unique corrupting factor.

It's a meme often resorted to by journalists who are either lazy or have an axe to grind (or both). Readers believe it because the growth rate of successful startups is so counterintuitively high that it seems like some form of cheating is needed to explain it.

I remember one article in the NYT purporting to show a pattern of bad behavior by successful founders, and the reporter was so hard-pressed to find a third example that he had to use the fact that Parker Conrad got bad grades in college.