I had an engineer-employee-type response to some of Paul’s hackers-and-painters essays (2004), and I still think there is a lot of wrong in some of his cherished opinions[1].
However my colleagues and I founded a company about the same time as ycombinator was founded (2005). I have a lot more respect for his opinions after watching the wild success of YC over the years: he has proven again and again that his opinions are valuable.
That said, I want to quote from the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32917643 : “I never hear pg talk about really any of the downsides or regrets about the startup ecosystem that he helped unleash.” . Paul’s article is a bit rah-rah (making the world better by helping found startups), and it is definitely one-eyed without the balance of what the costs are. I am definitely not arguing against progress, but I would appreciate some humble reflection on the costs to others of that progress.
I admit it is very hard for me to have the self-awareness to know if I am just trying to cut down a tall poppy, or whether I am just knocking down a success, or am I subconsciously railing against somebody due to their well endowed ego.
Regardless, there is a lot to learn from the essay, and I rate the knowledge he has shared as highly valuable (even if the knowledge shared is difficult for me to apply, given that I don’t run an incubator!)
The most unfortunate part is that I think that the quality of comments on HN about this particular essay have been low. I suspect I am adding more low quality comments myself.
[1] Example I disagree with “Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus becomes the basis of the dominance hierarchy” from http://paulgraham.com/smart.html — a couple of jems but mostly hard disagree with his points in that essay. Perhaps he has a different definition of intelligence, but dominance and intelligence are distinct variables (even if correlated). Maybe related to a generic comment about other programmer essay writers “you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.” — https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm — although that trends too far towards psychological diagnosis by comments which is really not productive (and I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end!).