[ushakov]

no wonder given George's attitude against business people

in his own words (from Part 2):

> I’d say that 95% of people I met in the hacker world were good people; only 5% bad. The business world has this flipped. To get ahead in the hacker world you need skills. To get ahead in the business world you need psychopathy.

maybe he needs to be more open and not let his negative feelings about business people worsen his business

[jjoonathan]

> no wonder they're in this position

Lean, scrappy, profitable, and ahead? One negative comment on HN isn't exactly a crisis. A fluctuation in "profitable" wouldn't exactly be a crisis, either, given that the rest of this industry looks like a money bonfire.

> maybe he needs to be more open and not let his negative feelings about business people worsen his business

Neg harder.

[anton_ai]

It is not easy to hire a business leader in the AI sector that knows something about AI. And here is not even the "easy" AI, we are talking about autonomous driving that is like the edge of innovation in AI using computer vision and reinforcement learning. It is hard to find technical people that knows RL, it is much easier for the funder to get better in the business side.

[ushakov]

this might all be true, but how are you going to hire any business people anyways, if you have a predisposition that "95% of business people are bad and the only good one's are psychopaths"

[kjksf]

That's not what he said.

Slightly re-phrasing, he said: "95% business people are bad (at helping companies achieve their goals) and 5% are good. The 95% succeed at keeping a job by being psychopaths".

I wouldn't fixate on the word "psychopath". He's not talking about serial killers, just general sleaziness and advancing careers not by being good at their jobs but, say, playing office politics well.

For a concrete example, let's consider that Zoox tweet about organizing Hispanic something event.

It took at least a few people to do it. Someone had to conceive the idea, there had to be a meeting or two discussing it, some exec had to approve it, someone had to execute it and Zoox paid for it, directly for the event and indirectly for the salaries of the people involved.

How much all this activity contributed to Zoox solving self-driving problem? Zero. Nada.

Did it help justify the continuing employment of the people doing it? Yes. Maybe they even got a promotion for going "above and beyond" their duties.

There's an argument that those people are more like parasites, draining the host company of funds, time and attention, advancing their own careers at the expense of Zoox.

For context: this happened 3 years ago.

Zoox still hasn't made a single dollar selling a product. They still hasn't solved self driving.

They got acqui-hired by Amazon for less money that they raised which means that all employees that likely worked there for less money and stock options ended up working there for just less money.

[skippyboxedhero]

The business of Zoox was an IPO. Engineering is a prop. This was taken to the logical conclusion with some EV IPOs, which had no business activity at all outside of an IPO.

I think part of the problem is that most people in tech are monomaniacs in a multi-disciplinary world. They don't have a good general understanding of what business is, so they make odd generalisations from their own experience (which is usually very narrow) psychoanalyzing people they don't know (anyone who makes such a statement is usually telling you more about themselves than other people).

In tech, most "business people" are bad because they aren't actually running a business but a bureaucracy that has captured a business, and needs to expropriate as much value as possible. The problem is caused by the same narrowness in thought that led to the generalization about 95% of whatever.

It is fairly simple to understand in business terms: these companies are taking money, setting it on fire, and employees are making out like bandits. But this isn't what a business does. The purpose of a business is to deploy and return capital on behalf of shareholders. Again, this requires a multidisciplinary understanding of the world. The world would be a far better place (and we wouldn't be about to go through this next phase) if we had more business people in tech, sadly there are almost none (even running companies, most tech CEOs wouldn't make it past middle management in any other company...their knowledge is just too limited).

[jjoonathan]

> In tech, most "business people" are bad because they aren't actually running a business but a bureaucracy that has captured a business, and needs to expropriate as much value as possible.

If you think this is limited to tech, you're outing yourself as not having much experience outside of tech. The whole world runs on Rules for Rulers, Ponzi schemes, and confidence games.

[paulryanrogers]

I'm curious if there are some good examples of these Renaissance people so lacking in tech.