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Yup, as an early employee of a very successful company, I know the opposite side of this. The ratio of key contributions between founders:early employees is probably between 2:1 and 1:1, while the ratio of tech press is about 1000:0. And you are dead on with the co-founder and founder thing. The tech press really has a founder and "single-person" fetish in the way they write their stories.

Basically, don't value yourself based on what the tech press writes about you. If you are the one getting the press: you actually aren't that great; if you aren't getting the press: who cares.

I understand that PG is writing this article because he feels it is unfair he gets written about too much and Jessica not enough, but the real crux of the issue is that the tech press is so stupid it doesn't matter. I mean just look at that article that was written about Jessica...

History books are as bad or worse than the tech press.

Taken to extremes, you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

> if you aren't getting the press: who cares.

Unless you're applying for certain types of visa. Then USCIS cares.

Yep! This was the first thing I took away from the post, too. Like, more people know about me than about Dave Goldsmith or Jeremy Rauch, but of the three of us I was the least important to the kind of success Matasano found.

"Because I'm a writer" is a kind of highfalutin' way of saying "because I'm super noisy". :)

HN may be noisy, but PG is all signal

I think the word "noisy" can have multiple meanings :-)

For the companies you've heard of, the median number of names you remember of people who work there is zero. For some companies you pay attention to, it might be one (typically the CEO), or two, or maybe more if you have a deeper relationship with them. If you work there it might even be hundreds. But once a company gets to a certain size nobody remembers everyone's name.

Similarly for bands or movies. The lead may be male or female, but either way, nobody except the most obsessed fan or people who worked there is going to remember more than a few names. The closing credits give you a more accurate picture of how many people it takes to make a movie, but that's not the story anyone can remember.

The press knows this already. If you're going to interact with them, you need to understand their need to tell a good story, or nobody's going to read the article.

So I think we can't blame the press for this (much). They could tell slightly more complicated stories, but they're still going to be inaccurate, and you won't remember all the names anyway.

If anything, blame how human memory works, and keep in mind that no matter what stories you read, the world isn't really story-shaped.

> In fact, the real moral of the story is that the tech press is almost entirely bullshit, and that is mostly to be avoided.

Any interaction I've had with the tech press from the "written about" side of things (or reading about close friends) has given me less and less faith in what I read about those I don't know.

I'd venture that's valid for any interaction with journalism these days. You read a story and if you are part of the story you realize how wrong and/or skewed the whole thing really is. Then you start to question how many other stories or articles are the same. Eventually you realize you can only take them with a grain of salt.

As a notable aversion, The Economist's coverage of computer topics seems pretty good, so I trust their other reporting more.

It's probably wise to enjoy "business biographies" as lying somewhere on the floor closer to the fiction aisle than the non-fiction.

Most stories are pitched by PR firms (or the other side of the same coin, attempted take-downs). Either way, they're ready-fire-aim -- finding facts to fit a conclusion.

First and foremost they are stories -- written by someone attempting, under deadline, to fit messy, complicated reality into a simple, entertaining narrative to hold your eyeballs.

Think of them as professional fan (or anti-fan) fiction.

Even long-form articles and books that interview many people, while admirable efforts, present a pretty small slice of reality.

With any article, if the PR firm doesn't sell a story, the writer has no interest in the plain give-my-client-press-for-free request.

It's kind of like that "overnight success, ten years in the making" thing. People want the clickbait, the sensationalist stories, even though they are almost never representative of real life. That's because the media's incentives are to get a lot of eyeballs, and not necessarily to provide an accurate retelling of events, which means they'll take the divisive, explosive angle whenever they can, whether the tone is negative (woman being harassed) or positive (mythical superhuman Steve Jobs accomplishes mythical feat all by himself), because that's what gets people clicking.

I'm not convinced that it's because the single-man myth is sexier. It's probably just easier to not go into detail (make that as short as possible) on that part of the story because it isn't the most interesting part to the layperson.

One would think that the truth would be most interesting to the layperson, but it seems that contemporary journalism knows better.