Paul GrahamVerified account

In any other domain, no one feels the need for conspiracy theories to explain outliers. At anything else except making money, you can do extremely well by being talented, hard-working, and lucky. But anyone who does extremely well at making money must have cheated.

Incidentally, the VC business is the refutation of this view. If cheating were the way to make lots of money, VCs would select founders by looking for good cheaters. And that is definitely not the filter they use.

It's the diametric opposite of the filter Y Combinator used. We actively screened out applicants who seemed dishonest. It not only didn't hurt us; it helped us.