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.
> 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.