And I think this interpretation is incorrect or perhaps doesn't uncover the reality of the strategy. Sometimes in business you sacrifice short term gains for long term ones. That is basically what they did. PG/Jessica have infinite deal flow for life, how many VCs can say that?
> they simply wouldn't spend time on things that they didn't enjoy and didn't feel were essential.
Agreed, I think we're all saying that and was the essence of my point. I took ChuckMcM's point as if they were acting in some benevolent favor - which is a trope that needs to die.
> "because for them, it is all about the money"
This'll just eventually slide into a philosophical debate about what money really is. Either way, my point is that this is certainly a very nice position to be in when you already have money. To pretend that people who run a financial services firm (which is what an investor is) aren't geared towards making money is laughable. To be very clear - let's not pretend as if that this notion is evil or doesn't allow you to do things that you are truly passionate about. There's a subtext here that assumes that "being all about the money" is somehow inherently bad.
Of course nearly everybody will say "I want to make money and to help people". The question is what they do when those two wishes come into conflict. Which is the high-order bit? There were many cases when PG and Jessica chose the interests of founders over optimizing their own money outcome—in fact this happened so often that it became proverbial, and many experienced people in the investment business were puzzled by it, as if there had to be some other explanation.
There's another characteristic that PG and Jessica had/have, which doesn't get mentioned as often: they simply wouldn't spend time on things that they didn't enjoy and didn't feel were essential. That's also true of Trevor, and probably of Robert too (I don't know him as well), so it was something all four of them shared.
That quality was for sure more important than optimizing for money, and may even be the high-order bit. Things that were supposed to be the 'proper' way but which weren't satisfying and didn't have an obvious justification, they simply wouldn't bother with. Complex negotiations, for example, or paperwork that wasn't absolutely necessary—even if nontrivial amounts of money got forfeited as a result. This approach turned out to be incredibly efficient and in retrospect looks like a superpower but I think a lot of it was just refusing to do dumb or boring things. Which actually is a superpower, but not one that most people would see that way.