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Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

This is the logical consequence of Peter Thiel's idea that you put bright (but often socially inept) high-school nerds directly into founding roles in companies. You end up with socially inept and socially inappropriate bosses who were never forced to conform to society's norms.

EDIT: I am not implying that Peter Thiel would condone this behavior.

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I feel I have to defend myself here to some extent (being a now former Thiel Fellow), but I can fairly safely say that the ~20 other Thiel Fellows that I would call "friends" would never do anything close to this at their companies. While there are now over 120 fellows and I do not know them all, I bet there is one or at most a small handful that could fit your description, but I would say that of any group of similar size that you were to pick from a university.

I would definitely say I am socially awkward/inept, but I don't think that necessarily correlates with being socially maladapted/unaware of societies norms. The sort of "bro" culture that exemplifies UploadVR's, Uber, and many other "hot" tech companies right now is the culture that myself and most other high-school nerds that I knew rejected... we were not the popular kids that drank, had sex, and partied. I think all of this is a symptom of technology being a much more attractive jobspace for the general public (which includes a lot of "bros") compared to just for "nerds" that it was decades ago, and your conclusion is the exact opposite of this.

Granted it is an anecdote with a relatively small sample size, but I have not seen this sort of behavior/ideas from anyone who never went to college or dropped out, but I see it from plenty of folks in their late 20s/early 30s that never grew up from their college fraternity experiences.

I shouldn't have type-cast an entire group. Clearly you can be socially inept and yet be appropriate (I was more like that too). But I also started as an employee in smallish companies and moved to founding them.

I should also note that some never seem to "grow up" - appropriateness simply eludes them permanently. If you look at Uber you have a founder that could, in theory, be a grandfather but doesn't seem to have a sense of what society condones.

What gives you the impression that these specific people are bright? Or were never forced to conform?

This is not how socially inept high school nerds behave; its how VC funded frat bros (who include their fraternity on their linkedin profile) do.

Not sure why I am defending Peter Thiel, but I don't think this has anything to do with him or any of his bad ideas.

You're right ... it's a very clear extension of the frat-bro phenomenon. You don't need to defend Thiel as I wasn't attacking him. He was simply a convenient adjective since I thought most here would know about his fellowship program (and I had to apologize for stereotyping high school nerds in another sub-comment).

The founders are far from socially-inept nerds. Perhaps relevant in some cases, but not at all here. I think that the average socially-inept-nerd company culture may be better than what this lawsuit implies existed at Upload.

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