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This comes up time and time again...a win for Paul Graham is not a company that makes 3.4M in revenue anaually. He is searching for and betting on billion dollar enterprises like Dropbox and AirBnB.

Success for PG is very different than success for many others.

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Like a lot of things that come up time and time again, not because it's true.

A lot of people assume that because we've funded some companies valued in the billions, this is the only thing that counts as success to us. But that isn't true:

http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html#f1n

It's funny you should link to that essay because, IIRC, the HN discussion had a whole lot of people missing that exact point. Despite the footnote.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. By I "success" I meant financial success for you.

I can't believe it still needs pointed out to someone who's been on HN for a while:

YC was never about the money.

For an insight into PG's motivations, you might want to re-read his essay on cities (it's more likely to be "power", as in your influence on the world). The footnote in the Black Swan essay linked above seems to corroborate that.

I'll check it out, thanks.

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