I'll take the opposite stance. Writing improves your critical thinking skills and practicing and writing improves your writing.

One of the benefits in forcing yourself to write is that you must learn to structure your thoughts and communicate them effectively. This is a valuable skill in any field.

I can imagine writing skills being especially important as a business scales and more and more information is communicated in written form, both with customers and employees.

The actual value of writing is that you get your ideas down on paper and start seeing them formulated.

It's a way to test your thinking, a way to reflect, a way to put it out there and get feedback.

Your post is just masturbation. You don't really need to write this comment, informing us of your opinion on this topic. But you do. Because you'd like some karma, and some recognition.

Only slightly sarcastic, but not everything has be to worrying about money.

I disagree: HN discussions are discussions, not blogs. The primary motivation for posting something here is to engage in a conversation. It's a very different form of writing as compared to blogging, for example. Running a blog is like running a 2nd business (in addition to your primary startup) - i.e. you have to spend a lot of time not just writing, but getting traction, promoting it, etc. Of course that would be a distraction for S&L, since building a search engine (not getting blog traction) was their goal.