How Did Arrington Capital Hire a Psychopath?

Michael Arrington says Arrington Capital once had a psychopath on the team. He was a huge overachiever, super charming, super handsome, and very smart, and the firm let him go for sexual harassment with somebody else on the team. He was so over the top that people could sense it, and that flaw meant he could never achieve what he wanted.

The hire came in as a summer intern and was turned into a more permanent role while still a very junior guy. Arrington did not pay a ton of attention at first. Once he got to know him, he was genuinely scared of him. After the firing, the man showed up maybe six months later as a partner at another fund and told that fund he had been a partner with Arrington Capital. Arrington Capital keeps few names on its website for security, so the claim was hard to check. Arrington knew the founder. The founder could have called, and he did. The man got fired, and the whole fund got shut down.

Michael Arrington says separating a psychopath from someone who wants to take over the world is genuinely hard, because both overachieve. Psychopaths mimic normal behavior. They taught themselves to seem normal because they do not feel empathy or sympathy, and they do not have the feelings other people have. Supposedly they do not feel empty. They just feel different, then learn to fake it until they are excellent at it, and quite often they fake being a narcissist. They slightly wrong people in a lot of small things, and the pattern adds up.