Paul Graham at Startup School 08

I think you're right here, but the qualifier "all things being equal" can't be taken lightly. Rarely if never are "all things equal." I also don't think a shift in the market context is necessary. We already have a market place where people who feel tricked or duped will have a lower opinion of the company doing the duping. dark patterns have a bad edge to them too--very few of them, when noticed by the user, leave the user actually feeling good about how they were duped. This kinda reminds me of the talk PG gave at 2008 start up school titled "Be Good." ( [link] or [this video] ) He outlines many ways why it's not merely ethically appropriate to be good, but also a strategically superior approach to running a startup. Ease of use, simplicity, trustworthiness--these are important qualities of a biz's reputation, both internally and in public perception. And Dark patterns tend to harm that reputation. Edit: Addendum--obviously there are monopolies or monopoly-like situations where reputation isn't important.

Bret Victor - Inventing on principle [link] Alan Kay - Power of Simplicity [link] Steve Jobs - Marketing (unveiling Think Different) [link] Robert Cialdini - On Influence [link] Peter Thiel - On Zero to One (Notes on Starts Ups or How to Build the Future) [link] Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Systems for Decision Making, Habits, Honesty and More (Farnam Street podcast) [link] Josh Wolfe - On "This is who you are up against" podcast [link] Richard Feynman - Fun to Imagine [link] Paul Graham - Startup school (2008) [this video] James Burke - Connections (BBC documentary) <No link> Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the Atom (BBC) [link] Elon Musk's 2003 Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture [link] Ken Robinson - Do schools kill creativity? [link] Paul Stamets on mycology, bioremediation and fungi- Joe Rogan Experience [link]

I remember watching a video of a talk you gave at startup school 08 and near the end during the Q&A, you said something to the effect of "we fund what people apply with, which usually ends up being some form of facebook or something to do with independent music". It seems that if the labels have positioned themselves as unfavorable toward startups to the point of making an anti-platform, that there would be demand for an independent, label-free music buying/selling experience for startups to work with. Yet the only thing I think of that comes close was the old version of thesixtyone's marketplace. Are the startups that apply to ycombinator in this area trying to build something outside of the current music ecosystem and failing (and why)? Or is everyone just trying to work with the current system and finding that it isn't feasible/profitable? The talk: [this video]