[aristus]

A good counterexample would be Lotus, and possibly Flickr. I'm not claiming PayPal would have been more successful otherwise. I don't know. Many strategies can be successful. Levchin is the one teaching kids that everyone else is "completely wrong", in the face of proof to the contrary.

And there are problems with Levchin's strategy. In the next breath he lamented that it narrowed the company's hiring pool by 50%. That should give anyone pause. His strategy had a direct, measurable cost that could turn into a strategic disadvantage.

There are also serious effects down the road, as today's engineers become tomorrow's investors. If only Brand X people get funded, and hire Brand X people, who turn around and become investors themselves, isn't that a serious problem? You can't adjust your "priors" about other kinds of people if they never get a chance in the first place. Maybe Brand X is optimal, but you don't know, and claiming to know is arrogance.

Kapor has a good essay on this: http://mkapor.posterous.com/beyond-arrington-and-cnn-lets-lo...