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by lawnchair_larry 4495 days ago
Except unlike PG, he hasn't really established authority on what he is writing about (other than perhaps a confusing endorsement from PG). What are Sam's big hits?

Edit: That sounds meaner than intended, but it's actually an honest question. How does this guy share a top 5 list spot with Jobs, Larry, and Sergey? How do we know we should take him at his word when he didn't learn these things be being successful doing them? I feel like I'm missing something.
2 comments
cududa 4495 days ago
He's an advisor at YC and an advisor at tons of other successful startups. Tons of successful entrepreneurs have benefitted from his advice and take what he has to say very seriously.
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devfeed 4494 days ago
But PG wasn't an established authority back when PG was writing fast. I remember reading PG in 2006, and you'd read lots of snarks on the tech forums of the time (Slashdot, Digg): who is this guy, and why should we listen to this bored washed up multi-millionaire who sold his startup to Yahoo? He hasn't done anything of note in the past 10 years! (They said the same thing about Philip Greenspun too, who was also writing at a faster clip back then).

Look, at the end of the day, "established authority" is only loosely correlated with worthwhile meaning. At some point you're going to have to move past the author and evaluate the words on the page on their own merit.

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lawnchair_larry 4494 days ago
> At some point you're going to have to move past the author and evaluate the words on the page on their own merit.

For this type of writing, you can't. You don't have the experience or the data to judge anything. That's just how expert advice works. It's not falsifiable to anyone that would be learning from it, so that's why the credentials are important.

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