I thought the idea behind lambda was good I was a lot more surprised by PG's strong support for Mighty which seemed a lot more bizarre. Though his recent tweets wrt Israel have been the most disappointing for me.
Lambda School and Mighty having the biggest PG cheerleading support of anything else kind of seals the deal. You can be great at something for awhile but youll always lose the zeitgeist eventually.
Not really "pinpointing" when those two were 1/2 of any specific startup mentions: "check out this amazing startup that has a whole lot of haters." How many startups have an entire essay written in support of them? https://paulgraham.com/fh.html
PG stepped away from YC 10 years ago to raise his kids in the English countryside. I don't see what seems to indicate he has a great thumb on the pulse of Silicon Valley startups in 2024.
Yeah the Mighty situation is when I started to question PG's decision making. Obviously he's super successful and has helped companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars succeed and grow. But even Steph Curry has off nights.
Mighty always sounded like a bad idea. But when I saw PG really making a big deal about it I followed Suhail on twitter because I just had to see what PG was going on about. From what was posted online it sounded like the company was super successful and growing, and I still didn't get it. And then it went under, without any fanfare. Just poof.
Suhail was lying to himself constantly on his Twitter. He believed reality different. PG talked with Suhail and thought, well Suhail is posting publicly and telling those he knows and I know things are going well, so things are likely going well. Because who would lie that hard?
But that was Suhail, totally sure in his lie, smart enough to change the future, but dumb enough to not see his business sucked.
I don’t think it’s right to be hard on PG or Suhail. People fail and Suhail was very smart, smart enough to hold a fracturing vision together much longer than anyone thought. He looked like a guy trying really hard and probably was.
We should be extremely hard on these people. They have accumulated staggering amounts of money and power and use it to exercise influence over many aspects of our daily life.
As a society we should work tirelessly to hold them accountable and break up their concentrated power when it develops.
That was one of the dumbest fucking startup ideas most people had seen in awhile. Many just sort of said the obvious out loud, which is that it made no fucking sense as a business, and then all these rich supposed geniuses tried to shout them down.
Even by the usual standards of the genre that one was a head scratcher.
What do you see being disappointing about tweets on Israel?
I've mostly seen him care about Palestine civilian deaths but I can't say I've read and remember 100% of his tweets.
