HN's original users came directly from pg's site, and HN is largely responsible for YC's meteoric success. His audience was in the hundreds of thousands, so without an audience none of that would have happened. And the audience came for his ideas.

You're right that money was a necessary ingredient, but it wasn't sufficient.

This is taking the discussion in circles, but the only reason people cared about his ideas was his prior success.

I remember how electrifying Taste for Makers was: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html I was barely 18 at the time I stumbled across it, and it made me want to read everything else. That lead to How to Make Wealth http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html and What You Can't Say http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

I didn't really care who he was or what his past achievements are, so at least in my case that proposition is false. I just liked his writing. It's probably impossible to know whether the audience resembled myself or your archetype, but it seems unlikely that hundreds of thousands of people heard about the Viaweb acquisition or about some rich Harvard graduate.

This is much closer to the way I remember it. I discovered the essays before YC existed, and he became one of my favorite writers. I barely knew anything about his online store thingy that he flipped during dotcom mania, and I didn't care about lisp. I definitely thought of him as a thinker that I resonated with.

Perhaps not those events specifically, but even the qualities you mention are byproducts of success. A how-to book on the same subjects, written by different authors of equivalent writing ability, where one is a successful practitioner and the other a fraud, will net you two different books.

While the signals we look at to determine authority are varied and different for each person, style-of-writing is generally included in that list. Why would so much advice on etiquette and morality suggest ensuring one's written communications are of high quality?

I'll admit I didn't really read the links you posted but in looking over the first few paragraphs on http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html he is clearing signaling his authority in how he name-drops MIT and talks about his MIT educator friend. (And I don't mean to imply there is anything wrong with that; writers are often advised to establish their qualifications early) I imagine the 18-year-old me would have felt confident about his essay simply from this reference.

Finally, the wannabe theory of thought leadership isn't a hard-and-fast rule. There are exceptions...

I started reading PG's writings in 2001 on the advice of my computer science teacher in high school. That was pre-ycombinator. I read his stuff because it was really interesting and spoke to me (while it doesn't have the same valence it once did for me, at the time I really loved his article on nerds).

It has been quite the ride to see this random dude whose work I started reading become a global juggernaut.

I think you have it backwards. PG's writing was popular before YC was popular, and it certainly wasn't popular because of Viaweb. It was popular because he's a very good writer, expressing interesting ideas with an uncommon clarity and concision.

He came to give a talk at my university when YC was just getting started, and while I was a junior there, about how we could start a startup, rather than going to big companies and working for others. This was very eye opening and exciting, and it was completely independent of his previous achievements - I had never heard of him before that talk, and I had never heard of his startup.

Who invited him to your university, and how did they know of him?

There's no contest that his blog was an instrument in his popularity; I am questioning that it was the main one.

Well, they were located in the area (Boston), and one of his cofounders (RTM) teaches at my school, so it probably wasn't that hard to organize a little talk.