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Agreed. Even YC explicitly says they look for the "naughty" factor in entrepreneurs, and this is exactly the type of quality I saw in Eric from reading this article.

"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." http://paulgraham.com/founders.html




I'd say trespassing would qualify as one of the rules that matters. Or really, any law. You can't build a company like that.

It's fine to break unwritten rules of decorum, or question conventional wisdom. This is another thing all together.


There's a reason why PG used the word "naughty" and not "criminal." In this case, we're talking about the latter.




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