I don't find that particularly hard to believe. Reading a pitch deck is like reading presentation slides - you can't really know what the author had in mind unless it's really good, and you tend to fill in the blanks with your own biases. That makes reading most decks a bit redundant. It's probably better just to talk to the founders and actually see their pitch.

I love the man's essays and he is clearly a genius, but he's getting carried away a bit on Twitter.

People considering him a genius as opposed to a narcissist who accidentally got rich likely fuels his need to drop nuggets of "wisdom" to the peasants like this.

There is some percentage of people who become wealthy accidentally - but PG is not one of them. He's like the Michelangelo of early internet startups.

He's not going to share it with you

His essays are usually a big pile of “focus on the important things and add value or whatever”-type platitudes. It’s funny that each one has been proofread and revised based on comments from the Who-is-Who in SV, a typical Emperor and His New Clothes situation.

To be fair though, 99% of wisdom books from successful people are like this.

Calling it platitudes is harsh. The Airbnb founders have repeatedly said that their company was going no where but for Paul Graham's mentorship and the series of advice he gave them, amidst an economy in dire recession.

And btw, before YC, the whos-who of SV were a closed-knit, exclusive group. You underestimate the very radical nature of YC when they started in 2004.

What AirBnb was consulting, not a pile of generic essays. Otherwise why would they give him 7% of the company?

He's good at getting attention, that's for sure.

Clearly very smart, but I haven't heard or read anything from him that would classify as genius.

For what it is worth, The most common technical definition genius is an iq of 140, or 1/400.

I think that is an important fact to know considering the confusion in this thread. There are people commenting that pg surely can't be a genius because this or that he engages in isn't ethical (to them).

But that's the thing, the IQ says absolutely nothing about ones ethical responsibility or the amount of empathy one has.

It is purely measuring "logical thinking ability". Things like "continue this sequence", "recognize a pattern", etc.

I also often see this dangerous assumption that ones political opponents or everyone with a different opinion than the one which seems most rational to ones own must be "stupid". In reality, the problem is that we focus on something as (arguably) unimportant as the IQ, which measures only something very narrow.

Another misconception about IQ is that those who are more poor or have less favourable job positions must have a lower IQ. To give just one counter example to that, very often, people who have some sort of handicap (ASD, ADHD, etc.) are also "gifted", have a high IQ, are good when it comes to logical thinking. But their handicaps still make their lives more difficult in general, so they face more adversity than someone who is "normal".

Sorry that i wrote a wall of text, was just thinking out loud.

In my personal opinion, the IQ is already a little dangerous, because it assigns a "value" to a human life, but that is an entirely different discussion.

Anyone who manages to start more than one wildly successful business counts as a genius in my book. pg has done it with Viaweb and YC

I'm no particular fan of pg and for sure I'm not all that knowledgeable when it comes to VC, but it is my understanding that at the very early stages of investment pitch-decks are pretty much useless, it surprised me when I saw all those people attacking pg for this particular issue.

I didn’t know people consider him a “genius”. Wow, I always consider him a good businessman.

Maybe he’s read one for Viaweb or to help someone pitch? But I believe it in the context of PG as an investor, similar to how Warren Buffett could say he’s “never read” an investment banker’s report.

There's an obsession with pitch decks and whitepapers in some communities that borders on form over function.

Imagine showcasing a complete Dapp with a tutorial, basically ready for launch excluding some UX changes, and then getting questions about, "What's your roadmap?" or, "Where's your whitepaper?"

I appreciate his perspective here. Words must mean action. Talk is cheap.

That one was more puzzling to me. Every one liner people would use to pitch their idea, every elevator talk essentially is a „pitch deck“.

That's not what most people mean when they say pitch deck, IMO. Most people are talking about a multiple-slide PowerPoint, covering a bunch of standard topics (team, market, etc).

A one-liner is a pitch. A presentation is a pitch deck.

Good distinction, thanks!