zlacker

>>mjcl+(OP)
> 4. Naughtiness

> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.

> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.

"What We Look for in Founders", PG

https://paulgraham.com/founders.html

I think the more powerful you become, the less endearing this trait is.

>>dilap+S1
This quote actually makes me disgusted. I don't think this is a quality to encourage on, especially since despite the tone it reads more as abuse.

>>aeurie+34
It's actually the most rational thing I've heard quoted from him. You have to be willing to open the box to see what's inside to know if you can do it better/cheaper/faster/smaller. There's ways of doing that without breaking laws, or doing something unethical with the what you learn. There's also ways of doing it without destroying something or violating anyone/anything. It also allows you to hear their response to see if where person is in that rationale. Do they toe the lines, do they run right across it, do they bend but not break, do they scorched earth everything they touch?

>>dylan6+97
Makes me glad there aren't people betting on how far I'm willing to go to bend the law. When you lay it all out like that you make PG sound like a cockfighter paying to get his champion bloodied.