[nl]

Invalidated? What does that mean?

Presumably you mean that his moral judgement is suspect and therefore you won't follow his principles. That's fine, and I can respect that.

What I cannot agree with is that you can't learn anything from someone you disagree with. I think that's a terrible principle to have.

If you can't learn things from people you don't agree with then you are at risk of groupthink[1] at the very least.

As a specific example, William Churchill's leadership of the British Admiralty during the Gallipoli Campaign[2] in World War 2 was - in my view - completely immoral (as well as terrible ineffective). Indeed, his attitude towards the troops he sent to fight created one of the core national myths[3] of my country.

However to reject learning anything from Churchill because of that would deprive me of a lot.

One can learn a lot from Henry Ford about transforming industries. Does the fact that he had his newspapers publish anti-Semitic writings[4] mean we should ignore him completely?

Does Bill Gate's many ethical failings while building Microsoft into a monopoly mean we can't learn from how he structured his development teams during the browser wars (I didn't realize how ironic this example was until after I wrote it. Maybe Marc Andreessen could have learnt from him too..)

In business there are plenty of people with moral failing in one area or another.

In my view you are better sucking the marrow out of their teaching, and then viewing what they say through the lens of your own ethics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_Campaign

[3] http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1398405363/61#61 (Sorry for the random forum link, but finding a better short summary of the "the English officers sent the Aussie Diggers to die while they stayed behind" thing is too hard right now.

[4] http://listverse.com/2010/02/12/10-terrible-bigots-in-modern...

[wellboy]

Yes, true. One can certainly learn from what they have done, but I think what I mean with invalidated is that they immediately lose all of their credibility with a statement like this.

Because of this, people won't be inspired by them anymore and their opinion doesn't have weight anymore, because now everybody knows they are not looking to make a difference in the world, they are only looking out for themselves and their own benefit.

Still have hopes for Ben, I've always admired a16z, but this really sucks

[webmaven]

I think you still have to qualify that as 'moral or ethical credibility', and even then limit it to topics relating to government power and accountability.

By all accounts, their treatment of founders is very ethical indeed (by Founders' standards), for example, and I wouldn't expect this to impact their credibility as knowledgable VCs at all.

In short, people are complicated, and applying well-earned admiration in one area to transitively enhance someone's reputation in another is clearly an all too common error (hence celebrity endorsements, etc.)