(2024-09-14) Karpf Paul Graham And The Cult Of The Founder

Dave Karpf: Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder Paul Graham has been bad for Silicon Valley. Without Paul Graham, we would not have YCombinator. And YCombinator is, chiefly, the Cult of the Founder. Silicon Valley would be so much better off without it. The companies that came out of YCombinator would be better off if their leaders weren’t so convinced of their own moral superiority.

YCombinator’s malign influence can be traced back to its very first class. The photo below is of YCombinator’s first cohort, in 2007. You can see a young, tall, lanky Alexis Ohanian in the back left row. Sam Altman stands in the front, arms crossed, full of unearned swagger

To Altman’s left is Aaron Swartz. Aaron cofounded Reddit, but left the company when it was sold to Conde Nast. He couldn’t stand the YCombinator vibes

It occurs to me that Aaron and Altman represent two archetypes of what Silicon Valley might value.

Aaron was a hacker in the classical sense of the word. He was intensely curious, brilliant, and generous. He was kind, yet uncompromising. He had a temper, but he pretty much only directed it toward idiots in positions of power. When he saw something wrong, he would build his own solution.

Altman has been crowned the new boy-king of Silicon Valley. It strikes me that in present-day Silicon Valley, thanks largely to the influence of networks like YCombinator, is almost entirely Altman wannabes

They have constructed an altar to founders and think disruption is inherently good because it enables such marvelous financial engineering. They don’t build shit, and they think the employees and managers who run their actual companies ought to show more deference.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because Paul Graham’s latest essay, “Founder Mode,” has been making the rounds.

The Silicon Valley of the 1980s, 90s, and even the 00s still culturally elevated hackers like Woz (Steve Wozniak). The “founders” (entrepreneurs, really) didn’t understand the tech stack, but they knew how to bring a product to market. Steve Jobs couldn’t code for shit, and for much of its history, Silicon Valley revered Woz as much as it did Jobs.

Aaron was, in a sense, my generation’s equivalent of Woz. It isn’t a perfect analogy.

They don’t even try to produce Aarons anymore. Everyone is trying to be Sam frickin’ Altman now.

YCombinator was one of the major sources of that cultural change, because YCombinator proved so effective at perpetuating its own mythology.

Notice the self-reinforcing nature of this model. If you have a ton of resources, and you get to pick first, it’s a lot easier to pick winners

YCombinator has indeed spawned many successful companies. It counts the founders of Reddit, AirBnB, Doordash, Dropbox, Coinbase, Stripe, and Twitch among its alumni. But less clear is how these companies would have fared in the absence of YCombinator. Did Paul Graham impart genuinely original knowledge to them, or just fete them with stories about what special boys they all were, while open the doors to copious amounts of seed funding?

The Cult of the Founder only really matters because of the gravitational force of money.

This is all of a piece with Marc Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto and Balaji Srinivasan’s batshit bitcoin declarations. A small, cloistered elite of not-especially-bright billionaires have decided that they are very, very special

The tech industry was never perfect. It never lived up to its lofty ambitions. But it has gotten demonstrably worse. And I think the fork-in-the-road moment was when the industry stopped trying to celebrate old-school hackers like Aaron Swartz and started working full-time to build monuments to Sam Altman instead.

its a paean to the ethereal qualities that elevate “founders” from the rest of us.

The single practical suggestion in the essay is that companies should follow in the footsteps of Steve Jobs (of course) and hold retreats of “the 100 most important people working at [the company],” regardless of job title. Graham insists this is unique to Jobs, that he has never heard of another company doing it. Dan Davies counters that this is, in fact, quite common, remarking: “When I was at Credit Bloody Suisse, they used to have global offsites with 100 key employees from different levels

The mood that animates Graham’s essay, though, is just sheer outrage that professional managers might constrain the vision and ambition of founders. In Graham’s rendering, the founders are akin Steve Jobs

Notice that, in this rendering, the story of Apple becomes Jobs-vs-Sculley, rather than Jobs-vs-Wozniak.