This is absolutely absurd, coming from Arrington, who twisted Jamie Zawinski's words from an anti-crazy-work-hours rant into rallying cry for gullible programmers to "work hard, cry less, and make history":
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se...
Guy records a radio PSA saying "don't punch strangers in the nose". Later, it turns out that the guy has a history of punching strangers in the nose. Is the PSA wrong?
There's a way to write the comment that points out that Arrington's history here might be checkered. Unfortunately, the way you wrote your comment isn't that way, because it calls the message into question along with the messenger, and the message here seems valuable.
He didn't say it was wrong. He said it was "absurd coming from X" -- which is different.
Jamie's diary page (src: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html ) says at the top that the excerpts might serve as a cautionary tale about working in a startup (and Arrington also says in his infamous article (src: http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/27/startups-are-hard-so-work-m... ) that people who think they are working too hard or sacrificing too much should quit their startup), but aside from that it's a just a bunch of entries from a personal diary, not a rant with an overarching message or thesis statement. Arrington used the diary entries as evidence that the startup experience was hard in 1994, but (correct me if I'm wrong) he never modified jwz's quotes or tried to make it appear that jwz had an opinion that he didn't have.
He's telling you the story of, "If you bust your ass and don't sleep, you'll get rich" because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they'll just slot a new one in.
Would you name some other ways to get rich with a reliability approaching that of starting a VC-funded startup?
The VCs may be in control, but at least it's a game that can be played. I'm not sure how it was disingenuous of Arrington to cite evidence of how hard jwz had to work. His point was that startups are hard. Jwz didn't seem to refute that, nor provide any hope of potentially escaping a lifetime of working for other people without doing a startup. Startup success is rare, but it seems more frequent than most of history has allowed.
Yes, just invest in a mutual fund. Overall VC returns are in line with the broader market at best, and are often worse. (Source: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.html)
Given that pg was giving background information, not an interview and that his words were misquoted and stripped of context perhaps you can see why people have decided never to give the Information the benefit of the doubt ever again.
It was marketed as quality journalism but it's just Valleywag with a subscription.
That said, suddenly everyone is talking a hell of a lot about "The Information" -- so maybe it will end up being a huge win for them.
Suicide or brilliant marketing move, will be fun to watch.