Why? SVN was pretty big before they launched Basecamp. I seem to remember even they saying it was instrumental to their success.
Granted, Paul Graham is a bit more of a stretch given that he's had a successful exit. But unlike YC, Yahoo Stores was hardly a major event in the wider scheme of things. Pre YC, I remember thinking that there was a major mismatch between his essays and his achievements.
He wrote two influential Lisp books, invented Bayesian spam filtering, did Arc, wrote essays (where the doing == the telling) and he had the Yahoo exit.
Then he started YC.
This doesn't disprove your primary point (that fame can precede the 'doing'), but I'd say that pg shouldn't be on the above list. You make a good point about 37signals, though. And I'll add Steve Yegge to that list too (Amazon -> Google)
Fair enough, though it depends a bit how you define achievement. Writing is in my opinion excluded almost by definition in this debate, otherwise the question of "what have Curtis / Gruber achieved?" is a bit moot. ARC is great, I'm sure, but not changing the world (yet). Bayesian filtering is a biggie, granted.
By the way, I don't mean to imply any criticism of people doing things in that order. On the contrary, a mismatch between fame through writing and "doing" seems like a good sign that you should buy a stake in that person, if that were possible.
I originally wrote 'popularized Bayesian spam filtering', but thought it wasn't strong enough. (What do you call 'made Bayesian spam filtering good enough, and then published an influential essay that caused the adoption and further improvement of the technique'?)
Thanks for the link - didn't find that in my cursory Google search.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/business/luck-is-just-the-...
From Gates himself:
http://creating-luck.com/2012/01/30/bill-gates-on-pure-luck/“I was lucky in many ways: I was lucky to be born with certain skills. I was lucky to have parents that created an environment where they shared what they were working on and let me to buy as many books as I wanted to, and I was lucky with timing. The invention of the microprocessor was something profound, and it turned out that only if you were young and you were looking at that could you appreciate what that meant. And I was obsessed with writing software, and it turned out that was the key missing thing that allowed the microprocessor to have this incredible impact. So in timing, in skill set, in some of the people I was lucky enough to meet – it’s unusual to have so much luck in one’s life, but it’s been a major factor in what I’ve been able to do.”
Granted, Paul Graham is a bit more of a stretch given that he's had a successful exit. But unlike YC, Yahoo Stores was hardly a major event in the wider scheme of things. Pre YC, I remember thinking that there was a major mismatch between his essays and his achievements.