Being good pays
Venture capitalist Paul Graham recently posted an essay entitled Be Good. His advice to start-up companies is
Make something people want. Don’t worry too much about making money.
He realizes this this is ”a description of a charity.” So to be a successful company, it pays to be like a charity. It also goes the other way around:
… it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work.
I don’t know that Graham is coming from a biblical worldview, but he has discovered some biblical principles. Note that these principles are like what we find in Proverbs: general statements about how the world often works, not universal laws. Doing good can, and often does, lead to financial success. But doing good can also lead to suffering.
