[sammathews]

I could not disagree with you more.

SV Entrepreneur types, as a generalisation, are more like the farmers in this article selling there wares than the WS Bankers. Sure people are money obsessed but they do it either by being profitable or by selling equity in value creating businesses.

I think the Google slogan of "Don't be evil" is the best summation of the average tech entrepreneur these days, generally because they are smart respectable human beings. They are looking to solve a problem that exists, for people willing to pay.

Of course there are always bad apples.

There is nothing broken about demand and supply, only the steps in between are broken, which the financial institution's such as Goldman saps on.

[forensic]

I think "Don't be evil" is a slogan of tech employees, not tech entrepreneurs.

I single out Hacker News as being psychologically different from normal software engineers. The focus on Hacker News is money, and many people here see profit as inherently virtuous. Social darwinism, eugenics, authoritarianism, and other extreme right political views are overrepresented on Hacker News, and given surprising amounts of leeway considering the swiftness with which other views are scrubbed away here.

[westicle]

Something which has always disturbed me about the community is the macabre fascination with funding and exits.

Obviously these are healthy steps in the progression of some businesses, but at times it seems HN focuses on them to the exclusion of whether a startup actually contributes something worthwhile. It is probably arguable that those things represent a reasonable proxy for the value created (or expected to be created) by the business. Then again, there are plenty of funded (and acquired) business models which are based on cynical exploitation of the less-educated for the benefit of the business owner, at a net cost to society as a whole.

If an SV entrepreneur-type is more focused on getting funded or making an exit than creating net value to society, I think it is fair to draw ethical comparisons with the WS banker-type.

[ramchip]

I'm not sure I can agree. Sometimes there is an emphasis on acquisition, but companies that sound overvalued or negative to society tend to be disliked on HN as well. Groupon, for instance, gets flak in about every thread that mentions it.

[MrMan]

Middle-men are often seen as ethically compromised in any supply-and-demand scenario. this is not new.

The whole GS franchise is built on their role as a go-between. Need hyphens? You might not understand the hyphen farmer's strange accent, but the merchant has been dealing with him for a long time.