> Y Combinator is fundamentally a nexus of people, like a university. It doesn't make a product. What defines it is the people. Jessica more than anyone curated and nurtured that collection of people. In that sense she literally made YC.

You seem to be assuming that pg wrote this essay to boost YC's reputation. Actually it feels like he wrote it to correct an injustice. A large one, I'd add, considering it's gone on for most of a decade.

The only thing that's weird and creepy about this entire thing is the rampant misogyny and anti-feminism in the entirety of the tech community and the central dogma that literal tokenism can solve these problems.

That you denounce an essay giving Jessica credit for her work as "patronizing and misogynistic" while defending a comment that was not only both of those things but cartoonishly so, probably takes the cake for this thread.

Potato potato, as they say.

>that was not only both of those things but cartoonishly so, probably takes the cake for this thread.

I think you're misreading the comment parent, which summarizes the gist of the article and points out that the reading most people will get at first tack is not very charitable towards Jessica. I agree with the comment parent that the article is quite tone-deaf. The whole "she was the mom of the group" is just plain cringeworthy.

You seem to be reading the comment parent as if he's saying "big deal, she was just his girlfriend" but what he's actually saying is, saying "she was a great mom to all of us" is a horrifically tone-deaf anti-feminist statement.

I could be wrong of course but that's my charitable interpretation of the comment parent. It's almost exactly the comment I came here to write, so if the author's intentions are different it's hard for me to see that past the surface-level obviousness of what they're saying.

"Jessica and I decided one night to start it, and the next day we recruited my friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell."

At least in the article, it's pretty clear that they decided to start the company together, and then brought on a couple other friends. (I've read elsewhere that the actual story was more like Jessica was looking for jobs at VC firms, the VCs were dragging their feet, and so PG was like "Fuck it. We'll start our own.")

"Brought her on to handle marketing at YC" is something you're injecting into the text, it's not anything that they wrote.

I might be wrong in this, but YC is not in the business of precisely predicting the future. It is within the business of creating and curating a network. Let me explain why, most VC funds are organised around a theme - they have a particular industry that they look at and then they create a narrow window around it and predict that by time X, this will be worth a lot, so they'll find people to capture Y. YC on the other hand has a thesis focussed around its own network. Yes, they seem to fund around general trends, but mostly they give smart people money and get out of their way.

Let's unpack that. Let's say you have 20 smart people and you want to guide them, give them resources, and then stay out of their way. What's the best way to do that? Well, the best way seems to be to create a peer group - a band of sister + brothers - who have set out to do something extraordinary. And then let common stress signals bake in the ties.

Now let's assume that you have these ties between people i.e. they become good friends. What happens when one of them achieves success? Well they'll start getting approached by people asking for help too. Young people, lost, and trying to do something extraordinary. Where do you think they'll refer these people on to?

So what started out as a support group, suddenly starts growing organically, and YC starts getting its pick of founders provided that the original people they seed it with are the right kind. The kind of people who attract other intelligent people. And identifying that is literally the core job of YC, which seems to be jl's job...

Is it unfair to say that she made YC given that?

Note though that it's only the women who get dinged as "girlfriends" tagging along with their technologist boyfriends when they co-found immensely successful venture capital firms.

Hopefully that helps you understand the immediate negative reaction your comments generated.

They didn't "recruit" RTM or TLB because they had specific skills that YC needed. They asked them because PG, RTM, and TLB had previously founded Viaweb together, and so they knew they could work well together and all had shared history and cultural knowledge. And then if you go back to the founding of Viaweb, PG and RTM started it because they were best friends at Harvard, well before RTM wrote the Morris Worm (indeed, if you read some of the news articles on the worm, PG is quoted). TLB was brought on because they asked all their friends "Who's the smartest person you know?", Trevor's name came up, and then when they met him, he rewrote their entire product in Smalltalk in 2 weeks.

No. She was not "dating the founder". She was a founder.

Your position isn't "controversial"; it's based on a broken and insulting premise. Please stop pushing it.

You're in no position to criticize someone else's "wording" and "tone". Please stop.

She is a founder of YC, BTW - that's what it means to be a co-founder. You could just as easily say that PG was dating the founder of YC, and she made use of his technical expertise and that of his friends in judging startups.