The 50 Most Important People on the Web

I can't look at these lists without hearing John C. Dvorak (dvorark.org/blog) in my head saying, It's all a bunch of crap. It's a bunch of editors and writers getting together and throwing out names.

It's basically link bait, right?

Congrats to you guys :)

42. Paul Graham, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, and Jessica LivingstonFounders, Y Combinator

Rather than sinking a whole lot of money into a handful of companies that may (or may not) turn into the next big Google, venture capital firms like Y Combinator dole out smaller sums to potential mini-Googles. Y Combinator commits to two rounds of funding and dispenses less than $20,000 (expense money, really) to coders so they can work, work, work on a prototype to parlay into more funding. In exchange, Y Combinator asks for 2 to 10 percent of the company's stock. Startups that these guys have funded include Reddit (acquired by CondeNast), Kiko, and Weebly. The names sound funny, sure, but do you remember the first time you heard the name YouTube?

It's amazing how small the Internet still really is. I'm guessing that many of people reading this have talked to multiple people on that list personally, and are connected to most of the rest within two degrees.

In addition to reading news.yc, anyone who has ever spent time in the wikipedia IRC channel or reading DailyKos or K5 can't help but having talked to at least a handful of these people.

silly yahoo link will time out. Here's the original: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129301-page,1/article.html