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.
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?