[dang]

You've truncated the quote to imply the opposite of what the article says! Here's the rest of the passage:

Graham thanked him, awkwardly — he thought they had bought some cereal for him as a weird or bizarre gift. The founders told him, no, they had made and sold the cereal boxes — it was, in fact, how they’d funded the company. They told him the story behind the Obama O’s. Graham sat back and listened, newly intrigued. “Wow,” he mused. “You guys are like cockroaches. You just won’t die.”

I can add something about the cockroach metaphor. At the kickoff meeting of the W09 batch, pg told us "you have all been chosen because you are cockroaches—except for one group of romantic dreamers". Of course we all thought we must be the romantic dreamers.