[yummyfajitas]

While I'm not a fan of Leah Culver at all (I view her as Eric Raymond^2, better at selling the image of geekiness than at actual coding), most startups fail even with good founders.

Besides, don't we pride ourselves on accepting failure and treating it as a learning experience?

[rdl]

I've met her a couple times, and have a different opinion. (I admit, I was biased a bit before meeting her, based on all the press and the murder of a friend's RAID while drunk...)

While she might not be the best computer scientist in the world of startups, she's great at the other roles in a startup, and is certainly a competent developer now. Not everyone in a startup needs to be a classically trained computer scientist with a Stanford PhD. Not every successful startup has to look like Google. You know who also wasn't a great computer scientist? Steve Jobs.

(I actually met esr when I was growing up in Pennsylvania, too -- he ran the local community Free-Net which I used for Internet access. He was a hardcore geek back then, and seems to have shifted more toward self-promotion and politics over time. He actually wrote some decent code for BSD/OS and ISP operations.)