I'm going to venture a guess that the statement under attack is most probably this one: The best case, for most people, would be if you could hire someone to ma

I'm going to venture a guess that the statement under attack is most probably this one: The best case, for most people, would be if you could hire someone to manage the company for you once you'd grown it to a certain size. startingup is making the assumption that the goal of hiring this manager is to maximize the startup's ROI with minimum attention from the founders. However, I believe pg's original point was not that anything can be maximized, but that things can more or less stay in check without the founder looking, which is a far weaker claim. This isn't about profit, but about giving the founders the opportunity to do something more interesting, if such a thing were to exist. The essay is cautions enough not to make any grandiose claims. Imho, you've got a straw man on your hands, startingup.