Your examples of Series A auctions help this conversation a lot, shedding light on how competitive the 2010 startup investment market is. Your disparagement of

Your examples of Series A auctions help this conversation a lot, shedding light on how competitive the 2010 startup investment market is. Your disparagement of pg's view of raising capital doesn't help. Regardless of its merits, it comes across as ad-hominem. Regarding its merits, you ignore several things: His experience raising capital did not start with YC; it started with viaweb. The essay quoted has a paragraph at the bottom thanking people for reading drafts of the essay. Surely that list includes people whose opinions you respect, who would have said something if the essay was baloney. You ignore the phrase "as of this writing" that refers to April 2007, when from the perspective of someone considering a startup, the Series A auctions for Stack Exchange and Quora were indeed "in the distant future". I'm as against fanboyism as anyone, but you have to be careful and factual when you criticize, else you'll fan the flames rather than quench them.