[pauljohncleary]

That's probably not that fair to lead the page with - if you read the rest of the wikipedia article you'll see that he founded Dialog in 1984 when he was 21 and it went public 10 years later. It looks like he made some major mistakes later on and during the dot-com crash, but building and running a multi-billion dollar company for 16 years is better than 99.9% of HN users achievements.

I wouldn't chalk off Powa's failure to one person.