they pop out thinking, talking, and building companies in a way that is remarkably similar to the way that PG would
Hmm. I'm all in favor of what YC is doing, but this makes me decidedly uneasy.
Groups with a charismatic leader have a tendency to devolve into personality cults. In my experience, to avoid this requires conscious, ongoing effort on the part of the leader (and enough of the followers) to stay aware of such tendencies and counteract them. First and foremost that means staying aware of these tendencies in oneself.
I don't mean to be harsh on the author of the post. I don't think he was being cultish, just enthusiastic, and that's good. But the risk is a very real one. It would be wise to alloy that enthusiasm with something else.
It makes me uneasy too. Boy, did I cringe reading those bits.
One thing that will protect us against YC getting cultish is that the qualities you'd want in a cult follower and a startup founder are exactly opposite. To succeed, startup founders have to be very determined and independent-minded. And since we want the startups we fund to succeed, those are the people we try to find.
Basically, we're looking for more Sam Altmans, and Sam Altman is no one's follower.
Give credit where it is due. You're an excellent salesman. Working on pitches for Demo Day helps the startups express clearly what they're working on. But, to the ear accustomed to your style, you can literally hear PG talking in other presentations.
That isn't cultish. That is taking good advice. YC is largely about giving good advice and putting people together.
This is nothing like the cultish following your essays and sometimes this community gets.
Remember the drama around the applications on this site last time? People took that way to seriously. And each of your essays spawns dozens of comments equivalent to "zomg, smartest thing evar".
But these two negative facets of this community don't actually make it into the YC program. That means you're choosing well, I suppose.
I firmly believe the #1 reason YC is good is the quality of the other founders and the alumni founders network.
It only makes you uneasy because it's written about you rather than something abstract like your core values, although that would be just as true. I'm sure Sam is equally uncomfortable with your description of him, even if he agrees with your assessment of what qualities you're looking for in a startup founder.
I think most people would benefit from thinking more like Paul Graham does. However, they would benefit from adopting the worldview and ideas of lots of other people too. The point is to borrow from everybody worth borrowing from. Usually people tend to over-imitate the person that they have borrowed from most recently, but this works itself out. In the long run they will benefit from having a little more Paul Graham in them, not “acting like Paul Grahams”.
Closer to the truth than you realize. The writings of both Paul Graham and Ayn Rand are successful because they clearly articulate what a large preexisting minority is already vaguely thinking, so the writing ends up becoming a rallying point for kindred minds to find each other. You can see what a powerful force this is in Rand's case, as it made her successful despite her atrocious fiction.
I was reading a thread in an Objectivist forum once where someone had posted a link to an online Myers-Briggs personality test. Out of 16 types, 90% of the members were the same one: INTJ. Personality is the major determinate of philosophy. I know I enjoy reading PG's essays because it's like reading an older, more experienced version of myself.
Apparently so - I wrote the initial comment based on my loose recollection of reading the book a few years ago. Looking up the big speech the Galt character gives in Atlas Shrugged, it's amazing how much of it relates. This paragraph in particular reads like it could have been pg's battle cry against soul-sucking faceless corporations that demand all of your creativity and trust none of your judgement:
"While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem — I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality — mine. It is mine that they chose to follow."
The link I put up is an aggregation of the various speeches, starting with the first big one. The page doesn't do a very good job of clearly dividing between them, just with super subtle references to page numbers in the margins.
That's an interesting observation on the correlation between the Meyers-Briggs results and the population of the Objectivist forum. I'm an INTJ myself and have the understanding that it's a fairly rare personality type. (For my part, the Objectivist viewpoint does have some appeal, but also deep flaws which keep me from embracing it.)
Anyway, I think that it's inevitable that the YC society will take on a life of its own which is oriented with pg's viewpoints. His writings are very charismatic and draw like-minded individuals. Those founders who resonate strongly with the essays and concepts of pg are even more likely to apply for and be accepted to YC.
Fortunately some of the mentioned aspects of the YC culture are independent thinking, self-analysis and critical analysis of others' ideas. Hopefully these attributes will prevent a simple cult of personality from developing. If YC has positive benefits for both the founders and the greater society (via the creation of Things People Want) then inculcating a culture which can accelerate the development of successful startups is an excellent achievement.
Lots of people say that, but the fact remains that no one has ever come up with an explanation of how or why genes would code for modern personalities, or with any evidence that's inconsistent with personalities being largely cultural and changeable with skill.
Largely biological, not entirely. Your philosophy or outlook can certainly have an effect on your personality, but from what I've seen different environments and ideologies just create variations on a biological theme.
You've seen themes in people. But have you seen evidence these themes are not caused by culture? Do you have an argument that they couldn't be? That it's unlikely?
A destroyer :) and I'm sure that's exactly the way that recruiters for large boring companies think of their competition when they go up against cool workplaces and try to land young programmers.
YC expands the scope of cool workplaces beyond the Google-like perks that a handful of companies might offer and get people to consider entrepreneurial options as well. And it's not a problem solely for technology companies, even Pixar has this problem - talented people have to leave to get opportunities elsewhere because only a handful of inner circle elite ever get to direct a film:
Which is ironic because Brad Bird's big break with The Incredibles came from his experience not getting a chance for creative expression with the old traditional animation studios like Disney.
Pixar has the same bottleneck problem they had at Disney during their feature era - there were "nine old men" established as the (supervising) animators and hardly any room for anyone else. Just like Pixar may have no room to let Doug Sweetland direct a fantastic movie, John Hubley saw limited opportunity at Disney, so he founded the animation startup UPA.
Anyway, it brings up the issue of what I'm going to call superlearning environments. The kind of places that become legendary because of the seemingly unbelievable concentration of talent. For animation, the late-70's Disney training program. For 3D graphics, anywhere Ed Catmull has been. For console games, I'd actually say Virgin Interactive Entertainment, which none of you have heard of.
These kind of environments are hard to discover unless you happen upon them and are blown away by the level of talent involved. But YC is most fascinating to me because it's a continuing (although periodic) experiment in creating one of these environments that's freestanding.
And this kind of environment is exactly what you don't get in a lonely startup. I know this all too well -- it's great to spend time with your co-founders, but I'd always worked with people significantly smarter and wiser than myself and it is absolutely the number one thing I miss.
>These kind of environments are hard to discover unless you happen upon them and are blown away by the level of talent involved. But YC is most fascinating to me because it's a continuing (although periodic) experiment in creating one of these environments that's freestanding.
YC is fascinating to me because it is a conscious attempt to form these environments. Historically, most of the great learning/building groups seem to have come about by accident.
Hmm. I'm all in favor of what YC is doing, but this makes me decidedly uneasy.
Groups with a charismatic leader have a tendency to devolve into personality cults. In my experience, to avoid this requires conscious, ongoing effort on the part of the leader (and enough of the followers) to stay aware of such tendencies and counteract them. First and foremost that means staying aware of these tendencies in oneself.
I don't mean to be harsh on the author of the post. I don't think he was being cultish, just enthusiastic, and that's good. But the risk is a very real one. It would be wise to alloy that enthusiasm with something else.