Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight.

Being mean makes you stupid. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights aren't sufficiently general — you don't win them by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. Your brain goes fast but you get nowhere, like a car spinning its wheels.

Mean founders can hire people who put up with them because they need a job, but the best people have other options. Having the best people helps any organization, but it's critical for startups — and a mean person can't convince them to come unless he's super convincing.

The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money. The ones driven by money take the big acquisition offer that nearly every successful startup gets en route. The ones who keep going are driven by something else — usually trying to improve the world.

Why benevolence is a structural advantage in startups.

For most of history success meant control of scarce resources, won through zero-sum fighting where meanness was an advantage. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum: you win by having new ideas and building new things, which reverses the historical polarity between meanness and success.

For new ideas to matter, you need a certain degree of civil order — not just absence of war, but prevention of the economic violence nineteenth-century magnates and communist states practiced. People need to feel that what they create can't be stolen.

Jessica Livingston has 'x-ray vision for character' — being married to her is like standing next to an airport baggage scanner. Coming from investment banking to startups, she was struck by how consistently successful founders turn out to be good people, and how consistently bad people fail as founders.