[mmkos]

That's my problem with a lot of the literature on building successful businesses. They all seem to be offering a white glove path and don't talk about all the tactics ranging from shady to downright illegal that helped many of the biggest companies today to be where they are now.

[akudha]

When I was a kid, I read about Jack Welch and thought he was great. Later I learned of all the shenanigans he pulled, not just unethical, but illegal stuff. And the way he trampled people. Bill Gates is a respected philanthropist today, he too did all kinds of shady, ruthless stuff to get to the top. Everywhere I look, same story - Amazon, Facebook, Google... The only big company I think is okay is Costco - either they really are good or I haven't yet about their practices.

There is this podcast called Behind the bastards - in one way, it is eye opening. But it is also depressing, it does a pretty good job of shattering all our beliefs and respect for the rich and the successful.

Is it even possible today to become super successful without doing shady/unethical/illegal stuff? Everything from garden variety wage theft all the way upto buying politicians and corporate espionage?

[neves]

USA culture has this idolatry for the Rich that looks like what the aristocracy always did: my "beloved" king, the kind princess... Like the philanthropy of the robber barons that made them respectable, but when they are still alive.

I prefer the French approach to take care of aristocrats.

[tetris11]

> America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

> Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

[atmosx]

In 388 BC, Aristophanes tackled the question, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" Society has evolved since then, but not drastically. I find his perspective "compelling" :-)

[nickff]

The French Revolution led to quite poor results for those fortunate enough to survive it. You might prefer the approach, but I doubt you’d enjoy the aftermath.

[ashoeafoot]

? Have you ever even opened a history book? Is this sarcasm?

[nickff]

I am not being sarcastic. The revolution and subsequent wars caused extremely high casualty rates among French men, while the country isolated itself from international trade, and suffered negative economic consequences.

[ashoeafoot]

Have you held the nations that stayed aristocratic and the havoc they caused next to france? Getting rid of parasitic waterhead bodies of government is always a pro birthong pains included.

PS : Those wars started because the assembled aristocracy of f europe jumped the reforming nation.

[watwut]

It led to dictatorship and itself was a super bloody dictatorships. The regime it replaced was failing, corrupt etc. But the revolution was not "make us free and happy" kind of event. It was "and now we are going to go through really really bad times" kind of event.

[satvikpendem]

Strange response, heard of the Reign of Terror? This helped Napoleon rise to power and after he was overthrown, they simply went back to kings. It didn't really solve anything.

[pyuser583]

America's attitude towards the rich is heavily qualified gratitude. Rich people tend to create lots of wealth. It's hard to argue Microsoft hasn't made America better. Same with Google, FB, etc.

But the rich are most likely to support effective political solutions (and be politely ignored).

Rich people have, in general, made America a better country, and there's a certain deference because of that.

But this isn't blind stupidity. The Sackler family is as unloved as the Manson family. But even folks who built their wealth in questionable ways (the Kennedys) tend to make America a better place.

I saw a video on Youtube where an American asked a Belgian where the "new money" families lived. The Belgian said "what are you talking about, there is no new money." Most Americans react in horror to that idea.

[insane_dreamer]

> But even folks who built their wealth in questionable ways (the Kennedys) tend to make America a better place.

I dispute that strongly. How has the Walton family made America a better place? I'd say they've made it a much worse place. Similarly, Zuck hasn't "made America a better place". I'm not sure you can argue that Gates and Microsoft have.

This sounds like the same trickle down economics BS that we've been fed for decades now.

[nasmorn]

Walmart has arguable built the most efficient grocery logistic in existence giving the whole country access to cheap fresh food with minimal spoilage

[throaway54]

The only real benefit is to the owners of Walmart though. Their food is not healthier, and their business impact is not better for local economies than what came before.

[insane_dreamer]

so what? it came at the expense of thousands of small businesses, destroyed hundreds of towns, and is one of the largest transfers of wealth in US history

all to serve us up cheap garbage

[codechicago277]

Aaron Greenspan created the early version of what Facebook became, and has loudly criticized the zero-sum tactics used by Zuckerberg, Gates, and other billionaires: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-legend-of-mark-zucker_b_7...

Some interesting books in this category: * Masters of Doom. It’s about John Carmack and the team that built Id Software * Einstein. By Walter Isaacson, author of the Jobs biography. Einstein’s 4 papers are one of the most unexpected, ground breaking discoveries in history * Houdini!!! Tells the story of the escape artist and magician, and exposer of psychics. * The Double Helix * Stress Test. By Tim Geithner who pulled the world out of the financial crisis * Man’s Search for Meaning. Surviving and finding meaning in a concentration camp

[jcranmer]

> * The Double Helix

This one is rather famous for Watson's minimization of the role Rosalind Franklin played in the process of discovering DNA, and Watson himself later acknowledged his mistakes in doing so (though he never corrected them).

[PaulHoule]

I'm fairly convinced most successful "social" sites have bodies buried somewhere. The problem of launching a two-sided market is tough.

It was against my ethics but we sent a round of unsolicited emails to about 10,000 people in Brazil to launch a voice chat service circa 2001. It must have been a really good list (and a different time and place) because we had close to a 40% response rate. (Later we got a list that was so bad some of the emails didn't have '@' signs in them!)

There's that famous story of how reddit was initially populated with fake users too.

---

I've never been able to enjoy that Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning ,since I read an essay that pointed out how pernicious it was that postmodern people like to fantasize that everyday life is like a concentration camp -- paradoxically that fantasy undermines Frankl's own thesis

I recently read an account of a 14 year old girl (a demo that is vulnerable to Franklism, I had one in an acting class I was in) who said she thought about the Holocaust (survived by some ancestors she'd never met) every day and experienced it as a trauma. If that's what it means to "remember the Holocaust" we might be better to forget. We hear the refrain that "it must never happen again" but it happens over and over again routinely

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

and if that memory makes us think it is a memory and not an ongoing crime, it is part of the problem and not part of the solution. You can take your own experiences of your group being persecuted and apply that to justice universally (Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner gave their lives together with African-American James Chaney in 1964 to fight racism in the U.S. South) or you can use it as an excuse to commit similar crimes (kill and displace civilians) against other people. It's your choice.

[thinkharderdev]

I read the Einstein biography. Highly recommended. But to the parents point, I came way think Einstein was a huge asshole, especially given his pop culture representation as a kindly old grandfather type.

[thruway516]

Probably every human being looks like a huge asshole if you put their entire life under a microscope. Even Mother Teresa did some giant asshole things if I remember. You're just not aware what a huge asshole you are because someone hasn't written a very good biography of your life from a perspective different from yours (or you havent lived long enough)

[throaway54]

Most people are very selfish when it suits them, and most people would completely deny that selfishness as being not part of their "morality."

[ghaff]

For any successful company, you can probably find ex-employees who think that some "fat trimming" was excessive and unnecessarily cruel or that they pushed some line or another in excessive ways.

The Jack Welch case (and I'd add Mark Hurd at HP) was an example of financial engineering looking great for a time--until it wasn't.

[rkhassen9]

ghaff. you said the first part well well. Welch "looked great" its the second part "until it wasn't." that stands out to me...because his approach, to kill the goose to get the golden eggs, so to speak, was doomed from the beginning. Its just hard to tell early on if you don't know what to look for. People in his orgs knew what was happening, but hard to go against the "hero".

I don't know a solution to these kinds of scenarios except for having a more wise and educated populace. Perhaps trusting the people at the bottom. Big issues. Hard to solve. And in today's world, harder than ever.

[etc-hosts]

> There is this podcast called Behind the bastards

I know so much more now about the figures behind the rise of the fascism before the end of WW2 because of this podcast.

[buzzardbait]

Perhaps not, but I think you can be "very successful" while remaining ethical.

Most people want to be successful because success brings happiness. But there is a level of success at which happiness starts to plateau and yields diminishing returns of happiness.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Thank you for saying that. I get low-level irritated at the constant background murmur that success means that you had to screw someone over at some point.

[jimbokun]

There's a certain strand of progressivism that holds as axiomatic that wealth and power are inherently evil.

[eevilspock]

It really boils down to your system of morality.

If your are willing to look at capitalism and free markets objectively[1], as just algorithms rather than moral systems (i.e. private property is part of an algorithm, not an "inalienable human right"), and you realize that it isn't moral that one's share of the pie be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral that the value of a person be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral to leverage your advantage or even hard work to grab a much bigger share of the pie even as others who because of birth circumstance get the thinnest slice or no slice at all, that it isn't moral to enjoy the fruits of cheap labor do to the desperation of the aforementioned, that it isn't moral to take advantage of your other advantages birth circumstances (e.g. being born within the borders of a wealthy country that keeps out those born in poor ones) to grab more, then you will find that material success (success as defined by capitalism) that is complicit in all the aforementioned does screw someone over.

Such a person will have a different definition of success: A life of contribution to the community done out of love and morality, not a coerced transaction leveraging one's advantages against those with less.

---

[1]: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ~ Upton Sinclair

[kortilla]

This is a classic midwit criticism of capitalism that assumes zero sum.

You can sell services and goods that boost productivity and the alternative is just the status quo that produces waste. Someone that creates a successful business doing something productive is not inherently evil because of capitalism.

[akudha]

Can you run a 1M, 10M dollar business ethically without screwing over anyone - employees, customers, suppliers, environment etc? Sure. What about 100M, 1B, 10B, 100B businesses?

How many Billion dollar businesses can we name that are run ethically? Not that many, correct me if I am wrong. I suppose at some level, profit and monopoly becomes the one and only motivation. Plus if you didn’t do shady stuff, your competitors surely would, putting you at a disadvantage.

Why else would Google drop “don’t do evil” from their principles?

[jppope]

Theres a ton of ethical wealthy people, you just have no clue who they are because they are playing a different game and don't want the spotlight.

Whats the shady ruthless stuff from Google? They've obviously started running their business differently after the easy growth went away, but I've never heard anyone be like: they made me pee in a bottle because going to the bathroom was too much time off the line.

[portaouflop]

Here is a nice list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google

Mind you that only includes the most high profile (and known) stuff. Plenty of skeletons still in the closet

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I think a problem is that we have to look at shady, ruthless, unethical and illegal actions as different categories, but to many people they are all the same.

Of course, you don't want to leave a trail of bodies in your wake but Life's not a bowl of cherries and taking a Pollyanna approach to business won't get you very far.

[SoftTalker]

Yes, and even just the normal business attitude of "our goal is to make a profit, not solve all the world's social problems" is viewed as "unethical" by many people (most of whom have never run a business).

[portaouflop]

If your business’s goal is only “make money” and not solve any real human problems then it should not exist.

[SoftTalker]

It doesn't have to be the only goal, but if you're not making money you will not be able to achieve anything else. So it's the thing that enables any other goals you might have (and, I might add, it's the main thing that makes it worth the risk, vs. just putting your money in savings bonds or something).

[portaouflop]

Read my post again, of course companies have to make money.

My problem is with those whose __only__ goal is to make money.

[anthuswilliams]

That would exclude approximately 99% of all the businesses that have ever existed (including most of those that claim to have some other, loftier goal)

[HeyLaughingBoy]

What "real human problem" is a coffee shop solving?

[jimbokun]

Giving people a place to buy and drink coffee.

[Wohlf]

From what I hear Costco is also changing after their new CEO took over and the stock skyrocketed.

[Jimpulse]

You talking about Ron Vachris? The guy who started his career as a Costco forklift driver?

[portaouflop]

>Is it even possible today to become super successful without doing shady/unethical/illegal stuff?

No I don’t think it is - and I would argue it never was - for me it is morally reprehensible to be a millionaire.

But then again humans are complex creatures and who is without fault may throw the first stone

[theposey]

sounds cynical but I'm shifted to believing not. If you don't do it there will always be someone else who will. Not to say you should, that's a personal choice of course, but in a competitive environment there will always be someone or lots of someones who will do anything.

[dbspin]

This is why its vital to make unethical corporate malfeasance costly. Meaningful fines and criminal convictions for individual executives responsible for law breaking, wage theft, and intentional violations of regulation, provide meaningful deterrent. In their absence tax evasion and white collar crime become normative, which changes the game for anyone working in executive level roles.

[jvanderbot]

Unorthodox suggestion - look at the documentaries and lit on mob tactics.

The mob is basically a corporation, held together by a charismatic CEO. In its later years, violence was (I think?) less common, so politics and deal-making became the norm. However, given the subject matter, they likely wouldn't whitewash the reality of it.

[vik0]

>Unorthodox suggestion - look at the documentaries and lit on mob tactics.

You got any documentaries and books/articles to recommend?

[rkhassen9]

@jvanderbot agreed. I think you are on to something. where can we go to learn more?

[gamebak]

I share your thoughts. Sometimes you just need to be at the right place, at the right time, solving the exact problem and this is troublesome, especially in this era when so much is already invented.

Maybe I just have a wrong view, but I don't know how to decouple from this.

[buzzardbait]

Success comes from hard work and perseverence.

Success comes from being at the right place at the right time.

Both of these statements can be true at the same time.

[ErigmolCt]

I would say that hard work and perseverance create the foundation, but timing and opportunity often determine the outcome.

[buzzardbait]

Yes. Although I suspect many would disagree since there's an entire subreddit dedicated to them! r/antiwork

[ErigmolCt]

Hard work alone isn’t always enough

[eevilspock]

Combined with the willingness to exploit those two things to hoard as much as you can, without qualms about taking advantage of cheap goods and cheap labor even from those who work as hard as you but get less because of economic/power/freedom asymmetries, without concern for the Mathews Effect (that wealth breeds wealth, that poverty breeds poverty)...

[withinboredom]

The fact that capitalism can be modeled by pure random chance only drives the point home, in my opinion. So much depends on luck...

That being said, luck can be engineered, to a degree:

- meeting people; networking

- having access to resources

- recognizing potential opportunities and taking advantage of them

That being said, I'm by no means "successful" but I'm also not a "failure" ... I win some, and I lose some.

[jvanderbot]

And just following up: Even though there is a significant amount of random chance, that does not mean you are randomly sorted into success and failure.

Even if you move from 0 to success with a very-small positive bias on your random walk, even the lower-bound on most of the results will be increasing with sqrt(n).

Don't let randomness dissuade you from effort, even maximal effort, because every thing you can do it increase your "bias towards success" will have an effect over long time scales.

Also, start early - stretch the time scale.

[withinboredom]

The way my dad explained it to me: "a heads or tail might matter, in the grand scheme of things, but at the end of the day, you gotta be there to flip the coin in the first place." Granted, he said that in regards to me being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the quote applies aptly here.

[no_wizard]

There are many types of success.

Tech has often been associated with novel success. That is success by inventing or perfecting a previously underrated, underestimated or wholly invented technology.

This isn’t the only type though.

There is success through persistence. In the long run, 95% of businesses fail. Simply running a component operation that outlasts competitors in a proven market can take you very far. It’s harder than it looks. Likewise this gets little traction on most media

Then there is success by accident. The one that gets most traction in media is businesses that have some flash in the pan unexpected success. These seem to be a traditional combination of luck and persistence. Along these same lines are businesses that come to fruition during a time in which they can succeed, like TikTok and the pandemic.

[ghaff]

Absolutely. I've been pretty lucky in my career, especially at a couple of critical junctions. But I had also put the foundations in place to be lucky at those junctions.

[akudha]

Not just capitalism, luck applies to even ordinary things like getting jobs etc. This is not to say we shouldn't try or put effort into whatever we are doing, but luck does play a big part. In one place where I worked, this 18 year old kid got an internship. She wasn't terrible, but she wasn't great either. She masterfully did minimum work for maximum benefit. I learned she was the kid of a VP who worked there - I am sure there were plenty of kids who were more qualified/motivated than her, but they don't have a VP parent.

There is a reason young people today feel hard work doesn't reward as much as it used to. Everything is stacked against them - from student loans to crappy jobs. SO MUCH depends on luck

[ttoinou]

Damn you’re right I’m tired of naïve explanations we can find in books. Wouldnt the authors be in legal trouble though ?

[diggan]

Back in the day, when authors were afraid of negative (public perception) pushback, they used to write and publish under pseudonyms.

Not sure it'd work today, everyone and their mother seems so focus on building their "personal brand" and attaching their name to everything that it seems impossible for an author to not take credit for something that would surely make big waves.

[ttoinou]

Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is much easier nowadays though. But I guess a self hosted blog would work just fine

[diggan]

> Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is much easier nowadays though

For state level actors, sure. But generally? I don't think that's necessarily true, as long as you come up with a pseudonym that is unique, not related to anything in your real life, and you haven't already published a lot of prose under your real name.

[ghaff]

It depends how much people care even outside of state level actors, how much of a celebrity you are IRL, and how much care you've put into covering your tracks including just not telling people.

These days you can probably do some writing pattern matching if you suspect the true name of an author but you can probably stay pretty pseudonymous unless people really want to determine a true identity. I don't have a lot of doubt I could probably publish a pseudonymous blog if I took some reasonable precautions and didn't write stuff that especially provided a fingerprint pointing to my IRL identity.

[ants_everywhere]

An interesting question is how authors of these books look for stories to turn into book. Stories traditionally have a standard arc where the hero faces a challenge but wins in the end having learned something. I'd be curious to talk to authors about how much the desire to fit this template influences the selection of what they write about.

[verisimi]

That's because the literature has a value in its own right. Like history, the message that is presented, is for the present. Reality/truth be damned. The present day operational advantage is all.

This is very cynical - but also freeing - when accepted. Do you think the yatch, billions, beautiful wife is worth your integrity? You decide.

[zie]

It's more of a, it generally wasn't illegal at the time they did those things, and of course now they want it to be illegal. It's much like pulling the rope up behind them so nobody else can climb the same ladder they did.

There is a reason you have to have licenses to braid hair, cut nails, etc(and charge for it) in many US states for instance. It's not a simple license like a food worker has to do. It's much more involved.

I mean if someone is going to mess with my hair, do a manicure or pedicure they should know the basic hygiene things much like a food worker has to do. I'm good with that. Why do they need more than that? It's not because we as a society actually care that much about a person that can't braid hair trying to charge for it. It's because all those beauticians want to limit their competition.

OK rant over for the day.

[narrator]

One of the fun things about reading Young Stalin, which is a biography of Stalin from birth to the Russian revolution, is nobody liked him in Georgia where he grew up, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, so it was easy for the biographer to get sources to tell all the negative and horrifying details of his earlier life building and running organized crime gangs to fund the Russian revolution. Imagine the most paranoid narcissistic jerks you've ever known who also happen to be exceptionally intelligent decide to take over a country and they manage to pull it off. Fascinating stuff.