[vaksel]

there are different levels of being unethical.

1. where you stretch the rules a little, break the whole "please respect our TOS" thing. Might include spamming a few blogs to get backlinks. Might include posting on HN with 2 accounts. Might include creating a back story to make your startup a lot more interesting. "No really...we wanted to save the world...we didn't even think about the money"

2. white collar crime...telling investors that you have 50,000 users...when in reality you only have 5,000

3. killing people.

If you want to get a bootstrapped startup off the ground...somewhere in the early days...you'll have to break #1.

Frankly I feel like the whole make them fill out an order form to see how many actually want to buy, falls under 0 or .5. Yes it's a dick move...but that's the only way you'll get real market research, instead of getting 100 people to say "yes I'd buy it"...only to find out a year later that when the time comes to pulling out their credit card all of them say "no thanks"

[DaniFong]

"If you want to get a bootstrapped startup off the ground...somewhere in the early days...you'll have to break #1."

This is baloney and has a higher chance of making great cofounders and hackers (like, for example, Marc Andreessen: http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/how-to-hire-the-best-peo...) run for the hills rather than work with you. If investors or business partners catch you seriously lying once you are basically permanently blacklisted. You might be able to eke out some kind of business from that black hole, but it is not easy.

"Third and final criterion: ethics.

Ethics are hard to test for.

But watch for any whiff of less than stellar ethics in any candidate's background or references.

And avoid, avoid, avoid." - pmarca

[vaksel]

is this the same Marc Andreessen that has invested in Digg, where Kevin Rose reported on a site without saying that he actually owns it?

Or maybe it's the same Marc Andreessen that sits on the board of Facebook which did a ton of unethical things to get off the ground?

The bottom line is that if you can think of a successful business...somewhere in it's early days they've done something that would be considered unethical in order to gain traction. The guys who played by the rules when they had nothing are no longer around.

Granted there are probably a few companies that actually survived...but chances are they got extremely lucky.