There are a huge number of Open Source contributors here who have produced way more wealth than Graham.
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.
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.
But they were only founded in 1994.
Do you perhaps mean the acquisition wasn't helpful to Yahoo?
I don’t have any particular admiration for someone so wealthy that “mentoring” is in their job description.
Arguably the tech industry is (or was up until recently) so disruptive that any idiot with money could invest in it and come out ahead (the SoftBank strategy).
Generally agree that a lot of tech luminaries are overrated and often not qualified to speak on topics out of their field though.
The difference is that none of your coworkers got to sell a company to Yahoo! at an inflated dot com era price to fund a venture capital firm.
Sure, YC is a famous seed accelerator, but it’s also not unlike a number of other early stage investment firms that also provide mentoring and guidance to early stage founders. The success of these venture firms boils down to a math equation and a selection process, not any sort of unique secret sauce.
It is a venture of owning capital and growing it, not of any sort of unique skill set.
They invented this model!
They were the first to realise that web-based startups didn't need a whole lot of capital and that the mentoring and guidance part was where the USP was for the investor in this sector.
You are also completely dismissing that Y Combinator grew from nothing into the top seed stage firm in the world. Look up typical returns on accelerators and incubators. Look up the number of unicorn companies that have come from Y Combinator as well.
I do think that YC, from a Performance perspective is light years ahead of all the others that launched just after it did.
For me, the skill of PG was being relentlessly focused on the core of what made startups in that era super leveraged. That insight is obvious now but it wasn’t at the time. The essays did synthesize explicitly how and why startups work. No one else was taking such an extreme position: that you just needed to make Stuff people wanted and the rest would be viable.
Lots of VCs to this day still think there’s all this other shit you need. And if I’m being honest, some YC leaders have bought into that too.
I agree, like all white male founders and rich before and after PG, that 90% of it is extreme privilege and chance but that’s literally all of tech Wealth at the moment