Paul Graham's major life work (so far) looks to be YC, not Viaweb.
Also I presume he had substantial help in starting YC.
Many successful people like Bechtolsheim and Khosla go into the VC business. Still these two would probably list Sun as their major work.
The OSS contributor comment still applies: In the technology business one would need to go into the league of companies like Intel to even start comparing the wealth generated by companies vs. the wealth generated by OSS.
True, but not very interesting.
I happen to think both were fairly innovative. Both viaweb and YC were at the forefront of a newish idea that seems pretty obvious in retrospect: Server based applications, and startup incubators. Both existed before to some extent, but pg recognized their value pretty quickly, and did them both well enough to make an impact. (I'd learn toward more credit incubators and less for server-based apps, but whatever.)
Selling shovels was one of the fundamental concepts during the first bubble, nothing new.
Webshops were nothing new either.
His innovation was turning startups into movement, largely using this website and blog about it so tirelessly (always using the term "startup") that he is credited with the concept.
But they were only founded in 1994.
If you’re selling shovels, you can succeed without any of your customers ever finding gold again. You happily sell shovels even if you knew the customers could never find gold.
When you’re buying percentages of multiple companies, you need somebody to succeed for you to succeed.