Following up to Tom… plenty of stories of successful ideas where the original engineers lost everything due to someone with more business smarts funding them, outmanoeuvering them, and seizing control of the company/idea.
I think a canonical example might be Phillip Greenspun’s experience at ArsDigita? http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/
The CEO and other executive level employees of Fortune 500 corporations make a lot more of money than any of his startup owners. Just look up how much the CEO of non-defunct Enron, Lehman Brothers make. Also compare to those of eBay, Cisco, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, etc. Hedge fund managers also make upward $1 billion some times.
I’m a bit late commenting here, but I can absolutely see Paul Graham’s point about bureaucracy in large companies. Our small company (with around 15 programmers) was taken over by a somewhat larger company (but not especially large by industry standards). Even in this modest enterprise, there is a proliferation of one-size-fits-all procedures which imposes a stifling layer of bureaucracy on everyone. This slows down the response time to customers, kills innovation and tends to turn everyone into time-serving functionaries.
The process is similar to the accumulation of government red tape. In small organisations, individual failings might typically be dealt with on an individual basis; someone might be scolded, or sacked. The other employees would take note and learn the lessons. But in large organisations, learning comes by creating a systematic solution for the problem. Someone made a change to the code and broke it? From now on, a committee will meet to decide on all code changes. Someone installed an illegal copy of some software? From now on, only IT can install software. Rarely is a new rule subjected to any sort of cost-benefit analysis, so the costs and bureaucracy accumulate.
Then at some point some management genius says: hey, we could outsource some of this stuff to a couple of guys working out of a flat in Bulgaria. Seems like they work a lot faster.
Did you notice that he has taken this whole anecdote out of the essay (online)?
I agree very much with your post. I have been a founder of a company, and there’s no reason to glorify it so much. The idea that there is shame in not being a founder is preposterous and insulting.
Paul’s a very smart, interesting and insightful guy, and I don’t know why he something says stuff like this.
Badly need your help. Is love supposed to last throughout all time, or is it like trains changing at random stops. If I loved her, how could I leave her? If I felt that way then, how come I don’t feel anything now?
I am from India and , too, and now am writing in English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: Cheap airline tickets for domestic and international flights booked to, from or within any country of the world.
Waiting for a reply :o, Palma.
I think I preferred Jeff Atwood’s posts when they were more about software engineering and less about other people’s opinion.
I was thinking along the same lines as Aaron. What does the high rate of failure for startups say about Paul Graham’s “lions”.
Also, you see blogs that have become well read, turn into something more onanistic and exclusionary. The readership gets huge and that can’t be, because I’m not like the un-washed masses out there. So, the writing becomes more condescending, belligerent, and extreme in it’s views.
It’s been said before, but I think it bears repeating: Paul Graham is a weenis.
Lol. Bump: Haters
Jeff, I’ve just come across this - checking I can comment, as I don’t want to go to the trouble and find I can’t.
Jeff,
In case you or anyone else is reading this all these years later 
This may sound aggressive, but it’s not. I think your feelings are pretty irrelevant. I recall a few years after leaving the paid workforce as an email having a conversation with a bunch of start-up folks. They weren’t particularly cleverer than anyone else but I remember walking back from the session thinking ‘that was a good conversation’. Why? Because as mundane as they might have been - let’s face it most of the tasks of starting a company are mundane - everyone was focused primarily on solving real problems, in what would work and so on.
That’s simply not true as an employee unless you work in a very enlightened workplace. There are just so many guardrails, most of them unacknowledged, most to do with the culture, with getting on, with avoiding trouble and so on. Graham is trying to reflect on that as a way of life.
Having lived most of my life now - I’m 68 - I can tell you that most if not all the folks I know who are employees havent matured in their understanding of the world since they were in their 20s. They’re adapted to water cooler conversation which is largely a simulacrum.
Shortly after the lunch I wrote this essay which may help you follow my drift.
Or may not 
I could also quote Alasdair MacIntyre on the point from this later essay.
In any society which recognized only external goods, competitiveness would be the dominant and even exclusive feature… We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound.
Mainly the idea is not to be rude and dismissive to a lot of people while expressing your opinion. It is possible, believe it or not!
I don’t disagree that startups are more interesting and dynamic than bigcos. But they are also not for everyone, just like some people don’t want to have children. Does that choice make them lesser people, like Graham clearly implies here?
Since Paul wrote the most epic self-own I’ve ever seen by any blogger – aka the “Origins of Woke” essay (don’t read it, I am intentionally not linking it because no one should read this.. thing) – I’m kind of re-evaulating Graham as a person. We’ll see…
Oh well, I think you’re a snowflake. It didn’t occur to me that Graham was being rude or dismissive. He was trying to articulate some important values. They’re his values, not yours or necessarily mine.
But there you go. Different people see things differently.
Just have a read of “Origins of Woke” if you dare. It’s truly excruciating.
Here’s a writer who is known for being concise, clear, and direct, suddenly producing an enormous and extremely confusing piece of writing, his longest ever, that contorts itself into a zillion tiny footnote pretzels to “prove” a point. This single blog entry contradicts every piece of writing advice Paul has ever given.
I’ve read it and liked it a lot - which I guess makes me a reprobate. (I was taken aback by Graham’s bizarre claim that Elon had just ‘neutralised’ Twitter rather than swinging it right. I hope he has changed his mind on that and on Elon by now, but who knows?)
Beyond that I’ve not really the slightest idea why you think the piece is somehow some self-confession of perfidy. As far as busting through one’s own indignation, I can recommend the approach to such things taken by a favourite philosopher of mine R. G. Collingwood. Coming to see such moments as potential pointers to his own inadequacies was the turning point in his whole life and career.
I’d add that, at least for me, if I’ve always admired someone and they do something that surprises and disappoints me, I always assume that that this has probably happened because I’m missing something. I’m being presented with an opportunity to understand things more fully, and that I’m somehow missing it. Note, this doesn’t mean I’m expecting to end up agreeing with them. Only that I’m hoping to see my way through to understanding their position in a way that I respect, rather than regard as trivially misguided.
I’m far from the only person who thinks so. A number of people weighed in here:
Note that the Hacker News coverage was “really not positive” either:
as a decent writer myself, I can tell you with quite some confidence that the “origins of wokeness” piece is easily the worst writing Graham has ever produced, on any topic.
Well, I’m glad you’re a decent writer even if you do say so yourself. You’re not much of a writer of comments - at least as exemplified by this exchange. I still have zero idea of what your objection is. If you think the Graham piece is particularly badly written, I don’t agree. I do think it’s well below his best and too wordy. But I think it’s a good piece of writing and thinking. Or is it a general distaste for his anti-woke ideas?
(I’m not really trying to dig in here. I’m not really wanting a knock down drag out debate on the piece, but just a little clarity on what the hell your objection is and perhaps some supporting demonstratoin would leave me with the sense that I at least understood your point a little better.)
It was interesting to glance through Graham’s “Woke” article and see the same kind of issue (but worse) that jumped out at me in “You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss.”
From “Woke” it’s clear that Graham has no idea of the origins of the term “politically correct”; he glommed on to a usage of it by conservatives in the '80s (fifty years after it first appeared) and completely ignored that until that point its use was mainly by leftists to criticise other leftists that had gone too far. The modern political correctness is, more than anything, a creation of conservatives that have no self awareness, much less any ability to self-satirise.
And the saddest part of this is that all he had to do to learn how ignorant he is was skim a few paragraphs in Wikipedia.
I fully agree with the general idea of “You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss,” but find it interesting that Graham never considers that there isn’t something special about startups that lets developers do their own thing in a way they can’t in other organisations. It’s dependent on the organisation, and things like Extreme Programming have been moving management to developers since before Graham started writing his essays. (XP has not become popular amongst managers the way “Agile” has; the reasons for this I think are obvious.) The world can’t be entirely startups: why does he not consider how to deal with all the non-startup situations? Doing that would probably produce far more good in the world, and bring the world’s developers closer to what Graham would like to see, than any number of startups that he might fund.