[dang]

pg hasn't been running Y Combinator for over 7 years!

You've got your causality reversed. It's not that this essay exists because of YC, it's that YC exists because PG is obsessed with the idea of doing great work. (There are other reasons too, of course, but that was one vector.) He was that way long before YC.

[eloff]

This is clearly true looking from the outside, but people seem so eager to attribute motivations to greed or self interest, and success to luck, inherited wealth, and connections for any famous and successful person.

Is it just jealously and pettiness? Do people downplay the achievements of others to make themselves feel better about achieving nothing remarkable?

There is a rarely used English word I learned for the first time the other day - compersion - which is the opposite of jealousy. When you take joy in other people's success. Let's do more of that as a community and as human beings.

[luffapi]

It’s not clearly true at all. Please tell me what was “great” about Viaweb (how pg got where he is today). It was literally about being at the right place at the right time. I think you’d also be hard pressed to find someone who would call Arc great.

> Is it just jealously and pettiness?

It’s neither, it’s people seeing who gets rewarded, how and why.

[dang]

> think you’d also be hard pressed to find someone who would call Arc great.

I would call Arc great! It's one of my favorite things about my job that I get to work in it every day...though not nearly enough every day.

As for Viaweb, are you sure you're not looking at this through hindsight? Those guys were among the first to invent what we now call web apps, years before AJAX. In an era of internet startups coasting on hype, they built a real business - basically what is now called Shopify today. They also did it with a shockingly small team. All that seems pretty great to me.

[luffapi]

I guess I don’t find an online store interesting or innovative. It’s hardly the Apple II or Linux. I also wonder if a sub 100M acquisition would be considered a success by pg himself on a YC company.

Have you ever heard of WebObjects? It was light years ahead of what Viaweb was doing at the time.

[dang]

An online store generator is not an online store. To do that with Lisp macros in 1995 seemed crazily innovative to me when I first read about it in 2001 or so.

[luffapi]

Honestly I’m not trying to be rude, sorry if it came off like that. That’s cool you like Arc, I’m a lisp fan myself (mainly Clojure).

I’m just pointing out that there was a lot of innovation happening at the time and what pg did wasn’t really lasting or that innovative. I don’t have a problem with it, until he espouses what I consider toxic work habits as advice. Too many people listen to him uncritically, it’s not good for our industry.

[eloff]

> Please tell me what was “great” about Viaweb (how pg got where he is today)

He built a product that many people loved enough to pay for. It's harder than it sounds.

> It was literally about being at the right place at the right time.

Entrepreneurial success requires that. If you're in the wrong place or the wrong time, you'll fail.

> It’s neither, it’s people seeing who gets rewarded, how and why.

What do you mean by that?

[luffapi]

Just because something makes money, that doesn’t make it great. MS is a perfect example. Made a ton of money with products and predatory business practices so bad they held back innovation for years until Linux gave people an alternative and created the foundation for the modern internet. That was great tech from the time period.

[AnimalMuppet]

It was great compared to what else was available at the time. Yes, it was about being in the right place at the right time - a place and time where three guys could build something that was better than anything out there, that people actually used.

[luffapi]

> a place and time where three guys could build something that was better than anything out there, that people actually used

This is being in the right place at the right time. In other words, luck.

[AnimalMuppet]

You asked what was great about it. I told you.

Yes, there's an element of "the right place at the right time". And there's working very hard to make the most of it.

Or look at it this way: That opportunity was there for multiple millions of people who could code at the time. It was Viaweb that took advantage of it, though.

[luffapi]

There were not millions of developers back then. According to Wikipedia there were 680k developers in the US in 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...

Regardless, the point is that we should not be listening to a guy who got lucky with mediocre software sold to a mediocre (at best) company in the middle of a bubble about how to duplicate his success.

Remember this is where Yahoo! was at at the time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com