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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

The difference is that PG actually did this stuff, while Arrington did not. PG is one of us, Arrington is not.

Mike (disclaimer: I know him) has done more startups than PG, and he did pretty much sleep under his desk for the first couple of years of Techcrunch (well, his desk was in his bedroom, and the Techcrunch "office" was the rest of his house) and has worked equally hard in the other startups he's done while I've known him. Including as a regular employee (that's how I met him - he worked at a startup I co-founded years ago).

So he's not a programmer. There are non-programmers that also work hard, you know.

He can't write code.

He publishes a blog to attempt to persuade an audience of those who can.

Before the blog, he worked with a company selling dropping domain names.

Again, he wrote no code.

I think jwz would agree that "hard working VC's" are not what makes a startup (nor the VC's) successful.

Techcrunch "office" was the rest of his house

nice definition of "under the desk"

His office was his bedroom. The rest of the people he worked with pretty much crowded the rest of the house.

So "under the desk" was pretty close to reality - he could pretty much reach his desk from his bed.

That's not true.

Paul worked very hard to grow Viaweb for several years, and eventually guided Viaweb to a lucrative exit via Yahoo.

Arrington worked very hard to grow TechCrunch for several years, and eventually guided it to a lucrative exit via AOL.

One of us what? Hes just some dude that manged to strike it big and is now a VC.

The most common linking factor I can see between the HN poster and PG is entrepreneurial- and tech-focus. Whats so "one of us" about that? Nothing. Or is it the "hacker" group, that weird banner created when pg massaged a term with a loose meaning and appealing connotation into the something divorced from its original meaning that people now want to identify as?

We're on this website playing in his playground, one built to serve the needs of YC with advertizing, finding talent, and indoctrination. That's it; everything else is ancillary.

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