This is the most defensive thing I've seen Paul Graham write. Is he planning on writing a post about every mistaken thing that someone says about Y Combinator? I'm reminded of the classic XKCD comic:
Will he write a reply every time someone is wrong on the Internet? I am surprised Graham published it. The tone is very close to anger. He runs the risk of triggering the Streisand effect:
The mistake seems minor enough that the folks at Y Combinator should be able to laugh about it and forget it. But if it gets under Graham's skin so much that he felt the need to write this essay, that raises the question of why it gets under his skin so much?
If people are repeating an untruth about you, that makes you seem incompetent, it could get annoying and be tempting to correct it. And I wouldn't really call that an essay.
Same here. I've read all his essays. Read his book. Follow him on Twitter. Read articles on him. Visit HN daily. But I've never heard about this meme. Go figure.
I'd be willing to bet the quote has been and will continue to be used against him. It was a dumb thing to say, from that viewpoint. It's easy to club him over the head with, particularly if it's misconstrued in terms of diversity.
I don't think he meant it that way, but it's easy to put it in that context.
EDIT-
Found an essay about women founders by sama that references it as exactly that kind of problem
"A specific issue that came up is a belief that we look for founders that look like Mark Zuckerberg. Actually that meme began as a self-deprecating joke. "
The weirdest thing is that I think this might be an act of revisionism. I recall reading a post on HN a few (or more than a few) months back about a startup writing a post-op article with reasons about why they had been rejected by YC, and among them was some musing that maybe it was because they didn't look like Zuck. pg responded in the comments not by saying that "it's a joke!" but that they once made that mistake and learned from it. That would at least vindicate the NYT usage of the 'meme'.
I do want to note, that on the face of it, it does not sound like pg was joking. Couple that with the fact that pg did say sometime ago that strong accents are a part of negative predictors. So following that up with the comment about Zuck-doppelgangers being more likely to succeed, the quote doesn't strike one as being a joke -- “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!’ ” So, YC did go on to fund this guy. Considering that YC is pretty competitive in choosing the right people and has a low acceptance rate... and this guy did get in, can it really be said that his looking like Zuck had zero sway?
I think pg & co. should just move on with this, not by trying to weasel out of this, but by saying they made a mistake and they'll try to do better.
>In 2010 we had one applicant that we noticed during the interview looked like Zuck—particularly his long neck. The guy's startup did terribly. Afterward it became an ongoing joke within YC. How could he have done so badly?
This passage feels inappropriate to me. In fact, the tone of the entire blog post seems off.
Glad I'm not the only one who found this post surprisingly petty and immature. Not to mention egotistical -- seriously, had anyone heard of this until just now?
Yea. Reads like Paul may have fired up the computer after having a little too much fun out on the town Friday night.
Maybe if I make an app that locks people out of their computers after 9pm on Fridays, I can get Y-Combinator to fund me and solve the problem. I do have an unusually long neck, which I've heard helps.
For context here is the original source of the quote from an NYTimes interview:
Several years ago, Paul Graham — whom everybody calls P.G. — began to film the interviews he and his partners held with prospective Y.C. inductees. When reviewing the footage, he focused on the interviews with start-ups that ultimately failed. Like any savvy marketing executive, he wanted to isolate patterns that portended ill, which he called “negative predictors.” He was already aware of a few — investors tended to be biased against older founders, for instance. “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32,” Graham says. “After 32, they start to be a little skeptical.” And Graham knew that he had his own biases. “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!’ ”
Watching the video footage, Graham noticed another correlation: the longer he took to decide a group’s fate, the less likely the group was to succeed. “When you have to talk yourself into something, it’s a bad sign — that’s true also of relationships, hiring and so many other parts of life.” (Graham has a rhetorical talent for moving swiftly from the valley to the universal.) But after ranking every Y.C. company by its valuation, Graham discovered a more significant correlation. “You have to go far down the list to find a C.E.O. with a strong foreign accent,” Graham told me. “Alarmingly far down — like 100th place.” I asked him to clarify. “You can sound like you’re from Russia,” he said, in the voice of an evil Soviet henchman. “It’s just fine, as long as everyone can understand you.”
It was flagdead-ed after about a half hour in the top spot. The only reason it's visible now is because the moderators revived it.
It's hard to tell what so many people on HN disliked about the post that they flagged it into oblivion. Has that ever happened to one of pg's blog posts before?
By the way, I think HN would benefit from making users specify a reason for flagging, e.g., spam, duplicate, etc., each of which could be handled appropriately. The catch-all flag would then more transparently mirror a downvote, which is what people use the flag functionality for now.
It was flagdead-ed after about a half hour in the top spot.
Yes, and then someone reposted it with a space added at the end of the URL, and the repost ended up sorted higher because it hadn't picked up any flags.
I had a different interpretation^1; something more like "we can be tricked by anyone who is incredibly smart, has an incredible vision, launches a product that goes viral, and drops out of Harvard".
But that's not "being tricked", that's looking for good investments.
Now, this is a very charitable statement. To be slightly less charitable, this could've been pg warning himself not to overfit -- "we know that Zuckerberg was incredibly successful, but that doesn't mean we should fund anyone with curly hair and a hoodie."
[1] "Had", that is, before this article. pg knows what pg means slightly better than I do.
For those complaining about the "quality" of this piece - that somehow it degrades his past essays - its a response like others here: http://paulgraham.com/kedrosky.html Where even in past he usually explains when he thinks he is being misunderstood.
For that matter, I think this was more of a response too: http://paulgraham.com/speak.html (written when suddenly the whole world seemed to be worried about pg saying um a lot). I think this article did calm those people a bit.
People typically resort to misquoting and misconstruing only if they can't find a good counterargument to one's actual views. So if someone has a post responding to being misconstrued, I take it as an indicator of good (and possibly controversial) thinking.
Sam Harris is often the victim of this sort of attack. He's become quite experienced at handling it, although he's had to spend significant time doing so. [1][2]
"So why have so many people since believed I was serious? For the same reason, presumably, that others cling so tenaciously to the idea that Obama was born outside the US: because they so want to believe it."
I am not sure they care about believing it. I got the sense that they were just looking to distract from actual conversations that should be happening in which they have little to add.
Is the 32 cutoff still true? Is it representative of the median age of YC partners involved? Also, I wonder how will this change as they age themselves!
On a tangent, after this silly "birther" furore, is there any serious push towards amending the US constitution to remove the birthright bar to the Presidency? It seems curiously unmeritocratic and undemocratic for a nation whose foundation mythology leans heavily on meritocracy and democracy.
I dunno, PG. Ask Al Gore about how easy it is to dislodge a misquotation once it becomes a meme, particularly if pushing that meme serves a narrative. He invented the Internet, you know.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Will he write a reply every time someone is wrong on the Internet? I am surprised Graham published it. The tone is very close to anger. He runs the risk of triggering the Streisand effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
The mistake seems minor enough that the folks at Y Combinator should be able to laugh about it and forget it. But if it gets under Graham's skin so much that he felt the need to write this essay, that raises the question of why it gets under his skin so much?