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On the one hand, you have a renaissance man (RISD-trained painter and Harvard-minted CS PhD) who authored On Lisp and started up and exited successfully with so

On the one hand, you have a renaissance man (RISD-trained painter and Harvard-minted CS PhD) who authored On Lisp and started up and exited successfully with some of the most respected technologists as partners (Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris). On the other hand, you have the author of Founders at Work, someone who not only thoroughly interviewed tons of successful founders (& bootstraped a pattern-matching capacity) but also has a reputation for a world-class EQ that built community and kept bad apples away. So, yeah, the DNA of the founding team matters a lot. Seems like for scaling companies (like Y Combinator, itself, is a company – and by Sam's definition of creating more value for others than itself, has become a platform) – traits are extremely heritable (not so much the case with children!)

throwaway1984zz 6y ago
> traits are extremely heritable (not so much the case with children!) This has been conclusively debunked. https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf > All psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic influence > Most measures of the “environment” show significant genetic influence > These are “big” findings, both in terms of effect size and potential impact on psychological science
- arrel 6y ago
  Here’s a nice takedown of Plomin’s theory. I’m not a geneticist, but there seem to be a lot of holes in it. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06784-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06784-5
  - throwaway1984zt 6y ago
    I just read the whole thing, how is it a takedown? Plomin's paper is a meta-study which discusses results that are robustly replicated because there is a crisis of reproducibility in this domain and replication is the arbiter of the scientific method. This article you linked is essentially an opinion piece about Plomin... edit: Did I get shadowbanned for this?! Post not showing up on different device..
    - samatman 6y ago
      you did, I vouched for it. I wouldn't jump straight to foul play. New throwaways are probably pretty sensitive to downvote/flagging/etc, it's unlikely you were moderated out of existence.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      It's a review of Plomin's book, Blueprint, including putting it into context with the history of similar works. "Like much of that literature, Blueprint plays fast and loose with the concept of heritability. Sometimes Plomin treats it (correctly) as a variable property of a population in a given environment. As population geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out in a scathing critique of Jensen’s approach in 1970, in times of plenty, height is highly heritable; in a famine, much less so (R. C. Lewontin Bull. Atom. Sci. 26, 2–8; 1970). But elsewhere, Plomin, like Jensen, treats heritability wrongly as a property inherent in a trait." ... "The most troubling thing about Blueprint is its Panglossian DNA determinism. Plomin foresees private, direct-to-consumer companies selling sets of polygenic scores to academic programmes or workplaces. Yet, as this “incorrigible optimist” assures us, “success and failure — and credit and blame — in overcoming problems should be calibrated relative to genetic strengths and weaknesses”, not environmental ones. All is for the best in this best of brave new worlds. "Plomin likes to say that various components of nurture “matter, but they don’t make a difference”. But the benefits of good teaching, of school lunches and breakfasts, of having textbooks and air-conditioning and heating and plumbing have been established irrefutably. And they actually are causal: we know why stable blood sugar improves mental concentration. Yet Plomin dismisses such effects as “unsystematic and unstable, so there’s not much we can do about them”."
  - awaythrowgang 6y ago
    Someone sent me this screenshot and asked to post to see if this was some kind of spam filter or if HN mods are actively hiding it (trying to invoke the Streisand effect I guess). She said the first post was also hidden until it re-appeared with your response. I am now also very interested because as far as I can tell this doesn't violate rules, just makes some people uncomfortable or something. https://imgur.com/T7GzfeE https://imgur.com/T7GzfeE
  - michaelkeenan 6y ago
    I wish that writer had spent fewer words describing Plomin as undemocratic, insidious, discredited, simplistic, and regressive, and more words actually explaining why he thinks Plomin is wrong.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      Well, the history of the idea that your ancestors determine who you are does have a certain smell to it.
      - sbierwagen 6y ago
        Smell is also not a terribly good argument for Plomin being wrong.
throwaway1113 6y ago
Someone commented this article in response to your comment and it was deleted before I could reply. Why? https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf
croissants 6y ago
> RISD-trained painter Not super relevant, but it's funny that the guy who has famously criticized credentialism [1] also thinks the best way to describe his artistic achievements is "studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti" [2]. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  I've never seen one of his paintings. Unless, did he paint the cover of http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html ?
  - croissants 6y ago
    Doesn't seem like it [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_(Bruegel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_(Bruegel)
- xapata 6y ago
  Within a field, among other practitioners, credentials matter little. Outside the field, what else do we have to go by?
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    Accomplishments.
    - NateEag 6y ago
      Bach was not recognized as a world-class composer until over a hundred years after his death, IIRC.
      - whatshisface 6y ago
        Why would someone in Bach's era needed to have recognized him as a world-class composer? If his music appealed to them personally they would know, and if they were a "record label," the fact that it wasn't popular at the time is all they would need to know.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Agree, YC is a company. Instead of owning 100% of IP and products being developed, it owns 7% of it. More thoughts here (from 2016): [0], also in comparison to Alphabet. [0]: https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/y-combinator-and-alphabet-inc-f99e46852ded https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/y-combinator-and-alphabet...
- benjohnson1707 6y ago
  Rather a platform, isn't it? Matches founders with VC for a stake of 7% as fee. Platforms thrive if you match supply and demand in a highly relevant way, and once they thrive, they generate network effects. So PG & Jessica were sort of the equivalent of the seller terms and conditions on the Amazon marketplace platform haha. They were able to spot and shape promising founding teams.

throwaway1984zz 6y ago

> traits are extremely heritable (not so much the case with children!) This has been conclusively debunked. https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf > All psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic influence > Most measures of the “environment” show significant genetic influence > These are “big” findings, both in terms of effect size and potential impact on psychological science

arrel 6y ago
Here’s a nice takedown of Plomin’s theory. I’m not a geneticist, but there seem to be a lot of holes in it. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06784-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06784-5
- throwaway1984zt 6y ago
  I just read the whole thing, how is it a takedown? Plomin's paper is a meta-study which discusses results that are robustly replicated because there is a crisis of reproducibility in this domain and replication is the arbiter of the scientific method. This article you linked is essentially an opinion piece about Plomin... edit: Did I get shadowbanned for this?! Post not showing up on different device..
  - samatman 6y ago
    you did, I vouched for it. I wouldn't jump straight to foul play. New throwaways are probably pretty sensitive to downvote/flagging/etc, it's unlikely you were moderated out of existence.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    It's a review of Plomin's book, Blueprint, including putting it into context with the history of similar works. "Like much of that literature, Blueprint plays fast and loose with the concept of heritability. Sometimes Plomin treats it (correctly) as a variable property of a population in a given environment. As population geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out in a scathing critique of Jensen’s approach in 1970, in times of plenty, height is highly heritable; in a famine, much less so (R. C. Lewontin Bull. Atom. Sci. 26, 2–8; 1970). But elsewhere, Plomin, like Jensen, treats heritability wrongly as a property inherent in a trait." ... "The most troubling thing about Blueprint is its Panglossian DNA determinism. Plomin foresees private, direct-to-consumer companies selling sets of polygenic scores to academic programmes or workplaces. Yet, as this “incorrigible optimist” assures us, “success and failure — and credit and blame — in overcoming problems should be calibrated relative to genetic strengths and weaknesses”, not environmental ones. All is for the best in this best of brave new worlds. "Plomin likes to say that various components of nurture “matter, but they don’t make a difference”. But the benefits of good teaching, of school lunches and breakfasts, of having textbooks and air-conditioning and heating and plumbing have been established irrefutably. And they actually are causal: we know why stable blood sugar improves mental concentration. Yet Plomin dismisses such effects as “unsystematic and unstable, so there’s not much we can do about them”."
- awaythrowgang 6y ago
  Someone sent me this screenshot and asked to post to see if this was some kind of spam filter or if HN mods are actively hiding it (trying to invoke the Streisand effect I guess). She said the first post was also hidden until it re-appeared with your response. I am now also very interested because as far as I can tell this doesn't violate rules, just makes some people uncomfortable or something. https://imgur.com/T7GzfeE https://imgur.com/T7GzfeE
- michaelkeenan 6y ago
  I wish that writer had spent fewer words describing Plomin as undemocratic, insidious, discredited, simplistic, and regressive, and more words actually explaining why he thinks Plomin is wrong.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    Well, the history of the idea that your ancestors determine who you are does have a certain smell to it.
    - sbierwagen 6y ago
      Smell is also not a terribly good argument for Plomin being wrong.

throwaway1113 6y ago

Someone commented this article in response to your comment and it was deleted before I could reply. Why? https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf

croissants 6y ago

> RISD-trained painter Not super relevant, but it's funny that the guy who has famously criticized credentialism [1] also thinks the best way to describe his artistic achievements is "studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti" [2]. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html

srtjstjsj 6y ago
I've never seen one of his paintings. Unless, did he paint the cover of http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html ?
- croissants 6y ago
  Doesn't seem like it [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_(Bruegel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_(Bruegel)
xapata 6y ago
Within a field, among other practitioners, credentials matter little. Outside the field, what else do we have to go by?
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Accomplishments.
  - NateEag 6y ago
    Bach was not recognized as a world-class composer until over a hundred years after his death, IIRC.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      Why would someone in Bach's era needed to have recognized him as a world-class composer? If his music appealed to them personally they would know, and if they were a "record label," the fact that it wasn't popular at the time is all they would need to know.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Agree, YC is a company. Instead of owning 100% of IP and products being developed, it owns 7% of it. More thoughts here (from 2016): [0], also in comparison to Alphabet. [0]: https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/y-combinator-and-alphabet-inc-f99e46852ded https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/y-combinator-and-alphabet...

benjohnson1707 6y ago
Rather a platform, isn't it? Matches founders with VC for a stake of 7% as fee. Platforms thrive if you match supply and demand in a highly relevant way, and once they thrive, they generate network effects. So PG & Jessica were sort of the equivalent of the seller terms and conditions on the Amazon marketplace platform haha. They were able to spot and shape promising founding teams.