The odd thing about this post is that it's not merely mistaken, but diametrically opposite from the truth. The thesis seems to be that because of my "position as a partner in an investment portfolio" (what?) I'm forced to choose bland, unimaginative startups that will turn a quick profit. In fact one of the defining differences of YC is that we don't have to do this. Because we make a large number of small investments instead of a small number of large ones, we can and do fund the riskiest projects we can find.

This whole article seems to be based on a misunderstanding of why Reddit succeeded. It looks so simple; therefore it must have succeeded merely because I promoted it. But everything simple looks easy in hindsight. If it was so easy, why didn't anyone do it before? Technically it was possible to build 10 years ago.

(And no, Reddit didn't copy Digg. The founders of Reddit didn't know about Digg when they started, and the two derive from different sources. Digg is Slashdot with voting instead of editors. Reddit is Del.icio.us/popular driven by voting instead of bookmarking.)