The premises to this are shaky but in general I appreciate the point. The entire essay could've been the parts that were removed in the second edition—from time to time I still kid to myself when I see certain groups, "They aren't founders"—and I would've gotten the gist all the same.

Also:

pg's "cliff notes"

https://paulgraham.com/bossnotes.html

And a standout comment from the original submission

> I've heard some Amazon employees say something similar (but maybe not as enthusiastically) about Amazon. One person described their structure to me as "like terrorist cells" [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=142210

The parent comment is an interesting read as well

> It was the wild west. We had different groups competing for the same government contracts. Managers and hackers alike got whopping bonuses for beating out other groups and they got to decide which contracts they wanted to bag. Entire groups were fired if they didn't bring in revenue. Fist fights, rancor and IP theft between teams were commonplace. But with all that they created some truly mind expanding tech for their time. They owned every angle of a highly lucrative market and showed no signs of slowing down... Until they got bought.