I hadn't heard of "viaweb" until now. Having just read the (tiny) wikipedia entry for it, I'm getting intense radio-on-internet vibes from it.
> Viaweb's example has been influential in Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial culture, largely due to Graham's widely read essays[11] and his subsequent career as a successful venture capitalist.[12]
Basically - rich guy tricked some other rich people early on in their career - attributes future success to this early "success" despite it probably being a bad idea and having less to do with innovation and more to do with big-dicking clueless investors.
Many things from those days were like that but there was no infrastructure for anything in the 90s at that time and viaweb added e-commerce. You had to write a bucket load of Perl cgi-bin horror to do this yourself.
PG should edit that Wikipedia entry and fix that last part to read less like what you imply. However, if you check the timeline, you can come to the same conclusion.
> Viaweb's example has been influential in Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial culture, largely due to Graham's widely read essays[11] and his subsequent career as a successful venture capitalist.[12]
Basically - rich guy tricked some other rich people early on in their career - attributes future success to this early "success" despite it probably being a bad idea and having less to do with innovation and more to do with big-dicking clueless investors.