If a potential investor asks you basic questions about your ambitions and you interpret it as "offensive" and "an attack on Silicon Valley", and you end up at William Shockley, I think that says more about you than them.
Digging up people's distant pasts to use as ammunition against them in the present is a dick move. I don't know anything about Bryan, and I think this particular video is so-so on its own merits, but I don't think that it's appropriate to bring up an email he sent in 1996 to dismiss his arguments.
I would completely agree with you except that this person has made a point of being a zero-tolerance firebrand instead of extending charity and a presumption of good faith. I think it is fair to highlight the hypocrisy of that.
I think we all deserve the benefit of the doubt, and it has made me angry when I've seen Bryan judge others so harshly and unfairly, just as it made me angry when I saw the way he treated David Miller in 1996. For what it's worth I didn't "dig up" anything, I remember these incidents from around the time they happened.
It's particularly disheartening for me because I have huge respect for his engineering skills. DTrace is extremely impressive work.
We could all possibly fire our past selves for things we currently don't agree with, that's why we call them mistakes and not certainties.
Some of us are able to learn from failures and regrets through trial and error, the consequences and being more aware we could be hurting others. Unfortunately, past blunders are easily referenced, overly embellished + manipulated and quickly judged in the present, as if it were a representation to the entirety of that persons true character. Which is wrong.
> Anyway, your request is entirely fair, and let me be clear that I (obviously?) regret the have-you-ever-kissed-a-girl response (which was actually an obscure Saturday Night Live reference). I was young, and it was stupid -- and I regretted it shortly thereafter, for whatever it's worth. I have never actually met David in person, but if I did, the first thing I would do would be to look him in the eye and apologize.
I'd agree with you if it was someone like Goldman Sachs or HSBC that I wanted to get funding from. I wouldn't criticize them like this because I know it would fall into deaf ears. I think the reason we criticize YC is we believe the people at the top actually care about more than their own quarterly bonus.
I think the issue you're bringing up is valid but is just a dark-side of VC in general than just a problem with YC.
Startups and VCs tend to bang on about community values a whole lot more than they actually care, if at all, in contrast, big corps at least don't pretend as much, though it seems like that is changing with recent shift of marketing trends.
I think the "problem with YC", and in a larger perspective SV, these days is quite specific. What makes, or made, these environments different is that they weren't made for geniuses so much as taking overall average people with an interest in technology and giving them the opportunity to use that interest to build something new instead of it getting lost at some random corporate job. The same way a new music scene isn't usually made up of child music prodigies. But now they are seemingly moving away from that.