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I know he's probably significantly richer now, but did people really perceive him as an underdog after he made millions from Viaweb?
by retsibsi 6y ago
I know he's probably significantly richer now, but did people really perceive him as an underdog after he made millions from Viaweb?
- dang 6y agoYes, partly because he wasn't famous (so reading his essays felt like being part of a club) and partly because he was advocating for an underdog perspective (that of the smart technical founder). The idea that you could succeed through programming skill, talking to customers, and cutting out bullshit was enormously exciting, and the fact that Viaweb had succeeded doing it was more of an inspiring existing proof than something to identify against. People like me used to sit around talking about it as sort of a "home team makes good" story. Then they started YC to prove the point at scale, and did prove the point at scale—so much so that it's no longer so easy to remember how radical the thing was. If you're radical enough and proven right enough, people will eventually call you "aggressively conventional".