Can the Truly Moral Billionaire Please Stand Up?

[In the past, people] didn’t know anything about their employer. My father or my brother didn’t know if their employer had a villa on the sea. Whereas with Google Maps, I can see where your house is. That’s where the world is becoming new. Mankind is becoming more ethical, but it is not happening because man has decided to become better than he was... See more

Part of Google's perceived aura (IMHO) when they started was that they seemed to be like the nebulous group of pre-Web Internet-savvy techies. Which were a smart group, tending towards altruistic and egalitarian, and wanting to bring Internet goodness to people, and onboard people into Internet culture. What seemed like one sign of this was times t... See more

Making money isn't evil, greedy, shallow, or vain.  Your biggest obstacle to getting rich is the harmful meaning you've attached to it.

" Mundane as it sounds, that's the most powerful motivator of all, not just in startups, but in most ambitious undertakings: to be genuinely interested in what you're building. This is what really drives billionaires, or at least the ones who become billionaires from starting companies. The company is their project. "

It is a better world if our most prominent people are moral exemplars with happy family lives. However, after a decade of meeting billionaires, reading biographies of highly successful people, and building products myself, I’ve come to accept that the opposite is probably true. The highest level of success requires wholly unreasonable people. Musk ... See more

Kindness isn’t always easy or obvious, because the urgent race to the bottom, to easily measured metrics and to scarcity, can distract us. But bending the arc toward justice, toward dignity and toward connection is our best way forward.

That, not exploiting people, is the defining quality of people who become billionaires from starting companies. So that's what YC looks for in founders: authenticity. 

Most people like to think of themselves as good people. Most people in first world countries have the opportunity to have a tremendous impact on other people's lives. If you earn more than $35k per year, you are in the top 1% of earners worldwide. This puts you in a great position to do good.