| Surely his 'expertise' expires over time. Before YC, there was no real playbook about how to start a startup. Now there is one (startup school). That's one reason why sama switched gears towards openAI. Starting up is now kind of a solved problem, conceptually But on top of that playbook, there is tons of advice available from countless people in any kind of niche imaginable, state of the art, updated almost every week. SaaS, e-commerce, platforms, engineering, marketing, you name it. But this very differentiated professionalism was a direct result of the success of YC, among a bunch of other players. Starting up in your early 20s in your doorm was a niche itself before YC, now it's very much mainstream (thanks as well to cloud and mobile). PG never was a 'startup expert' it seems to me. He always has been and still is a hacker that enjoys building things that are interesting. It just so happened that between 1995-ish and 2015-ish that very niche-y hobby turned out to be extremely valuable for (more or less accidentally) building the foundation of one of the most lucrative global commercial and societal transformations in history. The period between 2000 and 2010 laid the foundation. But not because it was intended, but because in hindsight, the right people with the right mindset turned out to build the right tool set that paved the way. And once this way was paved, the 'army' marched in with trillions of dollars and a global flocking of talent and ambition. Job done, it seems. That's why he lives in England now, writes, codes and checks out interesting stuff built at Demo Day. Like it has always been, but in a completely different world, in which building tech became the most valuable thing. |