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Basically boils down to an 'honor code'. When you are going down imagine yourself as a great person and that history will remember every action you did. If you keep your respect and dignity people will respect you and you live to fight another day. If not no matter how successful you may or may not be, someone will someday say: "yeah its a great company but he fu*ked so so so over". You don't want to be that person. You want to be: "yeah he put 3 companies under but he always manages to pay his debt".

Yep, this is the lesson of not burning bridges that you worked so hard to create, even if it makes your life harder in the short run, it will work out in the long run.

Recently a guy applied to the current place I am working, and unfortunately I had to explain to my superiors about his history of poor interpersonal skills at another job that we worked together at. This guy wont be getting a job now.

Work hard to make sure that when you leave, it will pay dividends in the future.

This isn't really true. AirBnB got to greatness by using a lot of shady tactics earlier on, and HN was split half-half on whether this was a good thing or not. History essentially forgot those shady tactics, and AirBnB is a gorilla now.

"The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten." -- Honoré de Balzac

What were some of those shady tactics?

I can't remember the detail, just the arguments really. I recall things like misrepresenting themselves to people on craigslist and violating things like 'don't send me promotional material' settings.

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