[Eduardo3rd]

This was written back when YC was a few companies per batch and all of the biggest successes were yet to materialize.

Today?

Stripe: 2,500+, AirBnB: 6,300+, Dropbox: 2,300+

I wonder if this stance changed a dozen years later now that there are several multi-thousand person organizations in the YC network. Does PG think differently today after seeing several examples of large companies run by people he knows personally, or would he tell a talented hacker not to work at Stripe because it is too big?

[JMTQp8lwXL]

Sales. Mature companies need sales departments.

[geofft]

patio11's recent article addresses this and is probably more informative on the subject: https://kalzumeus.com/2020/10/09/four-years-at-stripe/

> In a way, every scaling startup is an experiment in empirical microeconomics research on “What parts of the typical corporate form are necessary and which are pageantry which we only keep around due to anchoring, the sunk cost fallacy, and tradition?” Every time a startup bites the bullet and hires a VP of Sales, a lifecycle email copywriter, a retirements benefits administrator, or a cook, count that as a published result saying “Yep, we found this to be necessary.”

[CydeWeys]

They also need large departments for everything else: Accounting, engineering, HR, legal, facilities management, marketing, IT, customer service, etc. You simply can't run a huge business without a large number of employees, and you need a deep management hierarchy for that to remotely work.

[mlthoughts2018]

It’s the same with the article “Great Hackers” and Graham’s previous impassioned advocacy of private offices for every knowledge worker, even in dense urban centers.

It’s frankly hypocritical of Graham not to ensure YC and its companies embody values like this.

Instead he and other “thought leaders” around VC want to be viewed as progressive, forward-thinking people with an advocacy to avoid commodity thinking towards workers & their lives and workspaces.

But it’s all lip service - bluster so Graham can sound like he’s the good guy but actually just function as the same exploitative commodity thinking old boys club kind of investor privately.

All the PR credit without actually putting his money where his mouth is.

[ptero]

> It’s frankly hypocritical of Graham not to ensure YC and its companies embody values like this.

That is a strange sentiment, sorry. PG is not some omnipotent being that can "ensure" anything for the companies he originally helped launch. His "enforcement" options are probably minimal, based on his (by now many times diluted) ownership. The best he can do is advocate, leveraging a lot of respect he still commands in the startup community. And this is what he is doing there. My 2c.

[tomnipotent]

pg has never actually run a large workforce, so I take all of his advice on this subject with a (huge) grain of salt.