While I agree with you, I wouldn't attribute the entire effect to Paul Graham. There's a steady progression: Phase 1 was Larry and Sergey: they tried their hardest to stay in charge, but the powers that be (i.e. the money) forced a CEO on them. The best they could do was limit the damage by making sure the CEO had as much technical chops as possible. In retrospect, Eric Schmidt was great: a real hacker in background who had made the transition into a business guy at Novell/Sun. Pretty good progress to getting hackers more power: at least when they were forced to hire above themselves, they picked one of their own.
But the next one in the line went better - Call this Phase 2: Mark Zuckerberg (the next big company founder) was somehow able to hold his own against the money. I think we can credit this to Peter Thiel: since Thiel had first hand experience at PayPal, he probably has tremendous respect for hackers (I don't know what his personal hacking skills are, but I suspect they are good). Thiel (as the primary money behind FB) gave the Zuck free reign to stay CEO, which moved the needle further.
And now we're in phase 3: Zuck has shown the money guys enough contempt (remember the articles in Businessweek or whatever where bankers were angry that Zuck wore a hoodie and not a suit at the IPO roadshows?), as well as established a ~50B company with hackers firmly at the helm. Now it's common knowledge that you don't really need a "business guy". The next guys are free from this tyranny.
I do think that PG helped though. A lot of the education has come from PGs essays: I'd be surprised if there was anyone in the valley who hasn't read them, or at least organically come to very similar conclusions that he has: notice how they overlap well with Peter Thiel's class notes for CS183 (at least in some of the assumptions they both make about how the world works). And the part of SV that PG doesn't influence (the bigcos, I imagine. I don't know, I'm speculating at this point...) Thiel influences. So take the lead-by-example of Google, then Facebook. The intellectual underpinnings by Thiel and Graham. The evangelizing of Graham and Hacker news, and that's what I would credit for this outcome.
>I think we can credit this to Peter Thiel: since Thiel had first hand experience at PayPal, he probably has tremendous respect for hackers (I don't know what his personal hacking skills are, but I suspect they are good).
Peter Thiel's educational background is in philosophy and law [1]. There's been no public demonstration of hacking ability from him. I'd suspect that his respect for hackers was (if it didn't exist from earlier years through his personal relationships) grown from his partnership with Max Levichin in founding PayPal and keeping it afloat during those tumultuous years via multiple technical breakthroughs (including fraud detection, researched and developed by Levichin).
But the next one in the line went better - Call this Phase 2: Mark Zuckerberg (the next big company founder) was somehow able to hold his own against the money. I think we can credit this to Peter Thiel: since Thiel had first hand experience at PayPal, he probably has tremendous respect for hackers (I don't know what his personal hacking skills are, but I suspect they are good). Thiel (as the primary money behind FB) gave the Zuck free reign to stay CEO, which moved the needle further.
And now we're in phase 3: Zuck has shown the money guys enough contempt (remember the articles in Businessweek or whatever where bankers were angry that Zuck wore a hoodie and not a suit at the IPO roadshows?), as well as established a ~50B company with hackers firmly at the helm. Now it's common knowledge that you don't really need a "business guy". The next guys are free from this tyranny.
I do think that PG helped though. A lot of the education has come from PGs essays: I'd be surprised if there was anyone in the valley who hasn't read them, or at least organically come to very similar conclusions that he has: notice how they overlap well with Peter Thiel's class notes for CS183 (at least in some of the assumptions they both make about how the world works). And the part of SV that PG doesn't influence (the bigcos, I imagine. I don't know, I'm speculating at this point...) Thiel influences. So take the lead-by-example of Google, then Facebook. The intellectual underpinnings by Thiel and Graham. The evangelizing of Graham and Hacker news, and that's what I would credit for this outcome.