[SandersAK]

I agree that this article is a fluff piece but, unless you worked with him at YC or seen how he worked there, the idea that he wasn’t doing a lot to make YC successful is wrong. It’s not an exaggeration to say that PG’s work and insights changed venture funding and startups significantly. For better or worse!

Generally agree that a lot of tech luminaries are overrated and often not qualified to speak on topics out of their field though.

[dangus]

I guess my argument is that you could replace him with any number of the numerous reasonably above average performers at your company and the results would be the same.

The difference is that none of your coworkers got to sell a company to Yahoo! at an inflated dot com era price to fund a venture capital firm.

Sure, YC is a famous seed accelerator, but it’s also not unlike a number of other early stage investment firms that also provide mentoring and guidance to early stage founders. The success of these venture firms boils down to a math equation and a selection process, not any sort of unique secret sauce.

It is a venture of owning capital and growing it, not of any sort of unique skill set.

[SandersAK]

I agree that the vast majority of VC is just a shitty index fund and crapshoot.

I do think that YC, from a Performance perspective is light years ahead of all the others that launched just after it did.

For me, the skill of PG was being relentlessly focused on the core of what made startups in that era super leveraged. That insight is obvious now but it wasn’t at the time. The essays did synthesize explicitly how and why startups work. No one else was taking such an extreme position: that you just needed to make Stuff people wanted and the rest would be viable.

Lots of VCs to this day still think there’s all this other shit you need. And if I’m being honest, some YC leaders have bought into that too.

I agree, like all white male founders and rich before and after PG, that 90% of it is extreme privilege and chance but that’s literally all of tech Wealth at the moment

[jimhi]

This is a pretty unfair assessment. He didn't have to use his acquisition money to start YC or create the community site you are using right now.

You are also completely dismissing that Y Combinator grew from nothing into the top seed stage firm in the world. Look up typical returns on accelerators and incubators. Look up the number of unicorn companies that have come from Y Combinator as well.

[tim333]

It's not really that he just sold a web app and then put the money in an accelerator. They wrote pretty much the first web app and then founded pretty much the first seed accelerator which is still several times their competitors size in terms of startup valuations. Average performers tend not to do that kind of stuff.

[andyjpb]

Whilst it is now true that the YC model is now widespread, YC were the first.

They invented this model!

They were the first to realise that web-based startups didn't need a whole lot of capital and that the mentoring and guidance part was where the USP was for the investor in this sector.