[eropple]

I wouldn't call it "necessary" at all. Some of it is useful shorthand and steals some credibility for you if you're dealing with people who are way too deep in startupland, but most of the advice I've ever read from Paul Graham is on the more basic end of things.

If you have some basic notion of running a business, you probably won't find much in the way of revelations there. (Some of this is the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" effect, because the better advice you'll find in his blog is now common knowledge, but more is that running a tech business is still running a business.) If you aren't familiar with running a business I can see it being a useful naming-of-parts exercise, though.