https://paulgraham.com/spam.html

I think all the parts were invented by other people, but he got the right mix to make it work.

It's also like the wheel. Before it was a huge problem and no one know how to solve it. Now it's invisible.

Note that all modern versions use enhanced variants with a lot or trick to make it better.

I think it's the kind of work that (for beautiful moment in time) creates a lot of value for shareholders.

He wrote a lot about this. For example he built an e-commerce meta platform in Lisp that would allow anyone to build and customise their own shops that was far ahead of anything that existed at the time.

Creating YCombinator

Per Graham's own definition, the founding to Y Combinator. Setting aside critiques, some of his influential essays ("Ramen profitable", "Do things that don't scale", "Founder mode", "Beating the averages", "Schelp blindness", etc) also fit the bill.

For me keeping Hacker News in the way it is. One of the last "inspiring" places, now that reddit is dead.