yeh... airbnb is in violation. They illegally spammed people on craig's list.

http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-harvested-craigslist-t...

And, as much as I love them, their entire business is predicated on wholesale violation of local ordinances restriction hotel and short term stay operations. Those ordinances may themselves be corrupt and unethical but they're still laws.

Yeh... Tesla, Uber, airbnb all use illegal sales techniques. I miss PG's more unvarnished advice.

Tesla and Uber's defiance are for things that are pretty hard to justify.

As the multitude of airbnb horror stories show, anti-subletting rules and the like are usually there for some pretty valid reasons, and it's in a different category of illegal.

I, for one, am glad that my neighbour isn't inviting a bunch of strangers into his house every other day.

Uber in general is violating "things which are hard to justify", but their marketing tactics vs. competitors in NYC were unquestionably wrong, IMO.

Unethical behavior and marketing are notorious in Silicon Valley, where so many have this "holier than thou" mask on, and make public statements such as #2 on YC's list, yet use every unethical trick in the book to reach critical mass. They say that, yet they do this https://www.google.com/search?q=airbnb+craigslist+spam

One could easily classify growth hacking as a dishonest sales tactic. The amount of Facebook autoposts and obfuscated referral URLs I've seen connected with YC companies are staggering.

As I understand it, "growth hacking" simply refers to the practice of treating your company's marketing as a software project; of systemizing it, making it measurable and repeatable.

This is one of the reasons I am not in love with that word. For better or worse, for at least some people it is strongly associated with "naughtiness" in the sense talked about here: http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

At least some growth hacking tactics are examples of taking someone else's system and convincing it to do things that its makers had not envisioned. The paradigmatic example was Airbnb building a deep Craigslist integration via a process which does not wholly fail to resemble security research. http://andrewchen.co/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an...

"Security research" as a euphemism for "unauthorized use of a computer system"? Nice.

That is exactly correct.

In the same way in which a "social media consultant" is just helping people with a new medium.

On the one hand: that's what the good ones do. But on the other, there's definitely some dubious bullshit that gets excused under the shiny new name.

This has come up a couple of times and as a rough from memory list:

- PayPal - would buy goods on eBay but only use PayPal so the seller had to sign up to PayPal to get their money.

that's brilliant... not unethical. imho.