I followed pg's writing in basically real time since 2005. He wrote basically these principles, said them in interviews, re-told them in talks at Startup School and others, the whole time. This is a concise summary of a decade of intention and actions.
What's in this article has been said before, but not everything said before is in this article. Paul threw a lot of darts, and while they do have clusters, this is just as much him drawing the bullseye.
His comments about naughtiness / "what you can't say" / etc., for example, don't play particularly well right now between back-to-back Facebook advertising scandals, and Kalanick, and aren't in here. But he's talked about that as much as many of the things that are in here.
You can make the same kind of argument about this criticism of Graham. When it comes to YC's business principles, we have more to go on: the success of YC startups, and the way YC has transformed the funding landscape for startups. Those are real changes that YC was right in the middle of.
I'm not interested in looking to Paul Graham for advice on how to handle general issues in society (and am usually disappointed by what he has to say about them), but I'm also not interested in pretending that YC has been unsuccessful because it's politically convenient to make him a villain.
My bullseye metaphor was maybe a little off; the "target" I was talking about was not economic success, in which case YC hitting it is indisputable. It's the idea that this essay contains the principles necessary to achieve those financial results.
My claim is that YC has many principles that led to its financial success, and not all of them are, or are really compatible with, other principles mentioned in this essay.
("Good" as used in this essay also shares a kind of empty essentialism with Google's "evil" - a focus on BEING good or not BEING evil, rather than the trickier question of how to DO good / avoid DOING evil - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/what-...)
What you can't say is even more relevant today than it was when the essay was written. In the past decade, we've seen free speech in retreat, both in local and global terms.
College campuses that were once bastions of free speech have become so hostile to hearing differing opinions that it's common for people to pull fire alarms or even wear masks and commit violence upon attendees. Canada and European countries have increasingly turned to punishing various stigmatized political speech. China has greatly tightened the screws in enforcement of speech in private chat groups and use of VPNs.
Even more chilling is that speech codes are now being enforced globally. Not long ago, a Swedish author whose books strongly criticized the CCP was kidnapped from Thailand and detained in China. On a grander scale, China punished the entire country of Norway both diplomatically and economically for 6 years for a rights activist being granted the Nobel Peace Prize.
Perhaps the most extreme issue is the attempt to enforce anti-blasphemy laws on a global scale. Artists, authors, clergy and even comedians are increasingly at risk of being murdered by jihadists, regardless of what country they live in. Compounding the problem, western academic institutions are coming under increasing pressure not to offend any powerful group. Rational criticism of religious doctrine is often mistaken as racism and criticism of non-western states is mistaken as imperialism.
In times like this, it's extremely valuable to have both a good sense of what is okay to say publicly and how far that may diverge from what is true. That's exactly what the essay was about.
It absolutely is. The culmination of the "why" section is basically "because you will run a business better":
"In any competitive field, you can win big by seeing things that others daren't. And in every field there are probably heresies few dare utter. Within the US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share. Yet the cause is so obvious that any observant outsider could explain it in a second: they make bad cars. And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands—something you'd buy a car despite, not because of. Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspect no one dares say this. [11] Otherwise these companies would have tried to fix the problem."
