alt Hacker NewsI read this and see two possibilities.
1) PG honestly believes that his audience is unfamiliar with compound growth - i.e., an insult to the audience's intelligence.
Or
2) PG honestly believes that the founder of a successful startup is directly and wholly responsible for the level of magnificent growth a company achieves.
The 2nd one is some Ayn-Rand-like school of thought. That there are great people who have 1000x the work output of those around them. PG more or less alludes to this when he says stuff like
> The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built.
Notice how the credit for the startup's growth is credited to the founder?
> The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends
Again, crediting founders for the entirety of the company's growth. This is obviously flawed thinking in any company that has employees beyond the founder. Those employees are doing a significant amount of the work. And in any company with more than say, 5 people, they are doing the majority of the work.
PG and people who think like him believe ownership==credit. That's the whole problem.
Replies
Important context is; he is speaking to a generally small-c conservative.
So 3) he is well aware of his audience and is talking to them directly.
I'm somewhat confused by this. Many of the early startups are literally just the founders, and if they find product market fit without bringing anyone on, there's nobody else to give credit to.
I've talked to a lot of seed stage startups this past year, several of them have achieved PMF and have several large customers. None of them have more than five people. If the companies didn't exist, nobody else was going to build the things (most of them) are building.
Where should you assign credit in this case?
Some of them largely eschew AI programming assistance as well.
Surely for these companies, if the founders get to several million or tens of million in revenue without hiring any more people, those people have successfully become millionaires and we can credit them as such, right? Or do you simply think this is impossible?
Regardless his actual private beliefs, one of his "jobs" is to create new unicorns ycombinator can invest in. So evangelizing startups in general and spurring new entrepreneurs is very much in his interest, and spreading this kind of mythology seems like a useful step to that end. He only needs a small number of people to buy into it.