PG is a big boy and can defend himself from deserved criticism, but this is just a silly characterization. He profits from his contribution in helping people start their own companies.
No it's really not irrelevant. The implication of the post to which I was responding was that it was somehow undeserved or indicative of hypocrisy. PG earns his profit from investment and action, not exploitation or being anyone's "boss".
No one said anything about exploitation, but he absolutely earns a profit from people who choose to not be in a traditional boss-employee relationship. That's a statement of fact, and that colors the argument he's making.
I don't know what you mean by putting "boss" in quotation marks, but at the big company (1000+ engineers) I work for, my direct manager does not "boss me around" (if that's the sense you meant it), and the four more levels of management above him certainly don't. I have the freedom to propose and pursue new ideas, I'm regularly learning new things, and I set my own goals - with active feedback and input from my manager as to whether they make sense and what I should prioritize. I'd expect no more and no less from the relationship between a startup-accelerator participant and a seed investor. And in both cases, the boss/investor profits from the employee/founder doing good work.
What's different is the risk model. If my ideas don't pan out, my management (well, my employer as a whole, but my management is accountable for how they choose to use headcount and salary budget) is still on the hook for paying me big-tech wages, until they decide my ideas are so bad that it's not worth keeping me employed. If the founder's ideas don't pan out, pg is only out a couple thousand dollars. (At the time, YC was paying $17K.)
So, yes, pg earns his profit from investment and action, and that's precisely what's being pointed out here as a potential conflict of interest.
(If pg's actual point, reading the article more closely, is "Google's organizational structure does not give you that freedom and will not help you grow as an engineer," well, that's one of the many reasons I declined a Google offer. But Google is not every big engineering firm.)
It is, you can repeat 1000 times to no avail, but if you want, be my guest.
> The implication of the post to which I was responding was that it was somehow undeserved or indicative of hypocrisy.
In no part of OP post is implied that PG is "undeserved" of his earnings from those companies. If you invest in oil companies or mining companies you absolutely deserve all the money that is legally yours, you are ALSO helping to destroy the environment. There is no contradiction at all.
