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In January 2020, as news broke about Lambda School's scummy behavior, Graham gave Austen a pep talk which he later expanded into the essay, "Haters." It has age

In January 2020, as news broke about Lambda School's scummy behavior, Graham gave Austen a pep talk which he later expanded into the essay, "Haters." It has aged like a fine milk. https://paulgraham.com/fh.html https://paulgraham.com/fh.html

CPLX 2y ago
The more we see the legacy of PG’s various protégés and “thought leadership” out in the world the more I start to think Jessica Livingston might have been responsible for much more of YC’s successful trajectory than people realized at the time.
- robocat 2y ago
  PG writes about her influence here, and why she avoids the spotlight: https://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html https://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html He also seems to give some credit to Jessica for choosing to back the Reddit founders: we thought that we were funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them. But we felt bad about it. Jessica was sad that we'd rejected [them]. Edit: she gets mentioned here too: https://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html https://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html
- uhohspaghetti 2y ago
  Candidly, that was pretty clear even decades ago when this was an obscure little place. PG, for example, didn’t realize that discriminating against people who have children might not be great until he himself had kids. He’s a mid dude with gross feet who came up with a wildly profitable business model (6% equity in as many promising founders as possible).
  - leosanchez 2y ago
    > He’s a mid dude with gross feet Does he sell feet pics :) ?
    - uhohspaghetti 2y ago
      [dead]
debo_ 2y ago
From the footnotes: > There are of course some people who are genuine frauds. How can you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater, and because y is a fraud? Look at neutral opinion. Actual frauds are usually pretty conspicuous. Thoughtful people are rarely taken in by them. So if there are some thoughtful people who like y, you can usually assume y is not a fraud. I guess all those folks calling these guys "frauds" weren't "thoughtful" enough.
- choppaface 2y ago
  Same with FTX, VCs projected themselves as thought leaders buying into FTX and then it turned out they had never even thought
- amadeuspagel 2y ago
  Graham also wrote Crazy New Ideas[1] in response to criticism of Mighty, in which he claimed that if "reasonable domain experts" propose an idea it can't be crazy. [1]: https://paulgraham.com/newideas.html https://paulgraham.com/newideas.html
- pge 2y ago
  I wish PG was right about this, but there are plenty of examples of frauds that were not conspicuous and took in lots of thoughtful people (Bernie Madoff being one of the most obvious and public examples).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- beej71 2y ago
  (Edit: I've been informed on a side channel that non-disparagement clauses can no longer be enforced. IANAL--can someone elaborate?) As someone who was a low-ranking insider at Lambda some years back, it was my perception that the people calling Lambda out presented a mixed bag in terms of veracity. Someone here commenting on this story said that Lambda counted their student TAs in their employment stats, for example, but to the best of my knowledge this never happened. There were a handful (like three or four that I know of) that we did hire as full-time staff doing real jobs, and I'm pretty sure we counted them as employed, but not the student TAs. With respect to this ruling, it says that students were subjected to up to $4,000 finance charges. I hadn't heard of that at all. Reading the details, it turns out that's the difference between the published upfront cost of paying Lambda versus using an ISA. The upfront cost wasn't hidden; it was published right next to the ISA cost. But because they weren't the same value, and it was probably more expensive to use the ISA, they called the difference a finance charge. Which is fine, but if Lambda had simply not allowed people to pay upfront, there wouldn't have been a "finance charge" to complain about. In other words the finance charge was already published in the rules for how the ISA would be repaid. So, factually accurate, but a strange thing to complain about, like complaining that the upfront cost of a house is lower than the mortgage cost. Still others complain about the selling of the ISAs to investors, and say that that means that Lambda would still make money no matter how well their students performed. However, this would be a very short-sighted strategy as no investors would buy the ISAs if the students weren't performing. So selling them didn't really remove any of Lambda's impetus to place students in jobs. (It did improve the cash flow situation, however, which is why it happened.) From what I saw, the goal of placing students was ever-present regardless of whether or not Lambda was currently selling ISAs. My point is, there's a lot of information out there by a lot of people who aren't sure about what they're talking about. And it can be tough to know what's real and what's not. One thing I can say with certainty is that all the instructors who worked there back in the day were absolutely fucking passionate about getting students into jobs and changing the world, in that naive startup way. Some of the success stories from those early cohorts are the things I'm most proud of in my entire tech and teaching career. As part of my layoff agreement, I had to sign a non-disparagement clause to get my severance.
ipqk 2y ago
> Thanks to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Christine Ford, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Elon Musk, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading drafts of this. Such great company he keeps.

CPLX 2y ago

The more we see the legacy of PG’s various protégés and “thought leadership” out in the world the more I start to think Jessica Livingston might have been responsible for much more of YC’s successful trajectory than people realized at the time.

robocat 2y ago
PG writes about her influence here, and why she avoids the spotlight: https://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html https://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html He also seems to give some credit to Jessica for choosing to back the Reddit founders: we thought that we were funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them. But we felt bad about it. Jessica was sad that we'd rejected [them]. Edit: she gets mentioned here too: https://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html https://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html
uhohspaghetti 2y ago
Candidly, that was pretty clear even decades ago when this was an obscure little place. PG, for example, didn’t realize that discriminating against people who have children might not be great until he himself had kids. He’s a mid dude with gross feet who came up with a wildly profitable business model (6% equity in as many promising founders as possible).
- leosanchez 2y ago
  > He’s a mid dude with gross feet Does he sell feet pics :) ?
  - uhohspaghetti 2y ago
    [dead]

debo_ 2y ago

From the footnotes: > There are of course some people who are genuine frauds. How can you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater, and because y is a fraud? Look at neutral opinion. Actual frauds are usually pretty conspicuous. Thoughtful people are rarely taken in by them. So if there are some thoughtful people who like y, you can usually assume y is not a fraud. I guess all those folks calling these guys "frauds" weren't "thoughtful" enough.

choppaface 2y ago
Same with FTX, VCs projected themselves as thought leaders buying into FTX and then it turned out they had never even thought
amadeuspagel 2y ago
Graham also wrote Crazy New Ideas[1] in response to criticism of Mighty, in which he claimed that if "reasonable domain experts" propose an idea it can't be crazy. [1]: https://paulgraham.com/newideas.html https://paulgraham.com/newideas.html
pge 2y ago
I wish PG was right about this, but there are plenty of examples of frauds that were not conspicuous and took in lots of thoughtful people (Bernie Madoff being one of the most obvious and public examples).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
beej71 2y ago
(Edit: I've been informed on a side channel that non-disparagement clauses can no longer be enforced. IANAL--can someone elaborate?) As someone who was a low-ranking insider at Lambda some years back, it was my perception that the people calling Lambda out presented a mixed bag in terms of veracity. Someone here commenting on this story said that Lambda counted their student TAs in their employment stats, for example, but to the best of my knowledge this never happened. There were a handful (like three or four that I know of) that we did hire as full-time staff doing real jobs, and I'm pretty sure we counted them as employed, but not the student TAs. With respect to this ruling, it says that students were subjected to up to $4,000 finance charges. I hadn't heard of that at all. Reading the details, it turns out that's the difference between the published upfront cost of paying Lambda versus using an ISA. The upfront cost wasn't hidden; it was published right next to the ISA cost. But because they weren't the same value, and it was probably more expensive to use the ISA, they called the difference a finance charge. Which is fine, but if Lambda had simply not allowed people to pay upfront, there wouldn't have been a "finance charge" to complain about. In other words the finance charge was already published in the rules for how the ISA would be repaid. So, factually accurate, but a strange thing to complain about, like complaining that the upfront cost of a house is lower than the mortgage cost. Still others complain about the selling of the ISAs to investors, and say that that means that Lambda would still make money no matter how well their students performed. However, this would be a very short-sighted strategy as no investors would buy the ISAs if the students weren't performing. So selling them didn't really remove any of Lambda's impetus to place students in jobs. (It did improve the cash flow situation, however, which is why it happened.) From what I saw, the goal of placing students was ever-present regardless of whether or not Lambda was currently selling ISAs. My point is, there's a lot of information out there by a lot of people who aren't sure about what they're talking about. And it can be tough to know what's real and what's not. One thing I can say with certainty is that all the instructors who worked there back in the day were absolutely fucking passionate about getting students into jobs and changing the world, in that naive startup way. Some of the success stories from those early cohorts are the things I'm most proud of in my entire tech and teaching career. As part of my layoff agreement, I had to sign a non-disparagement clause to get my severance.

ipqk 2y ago

> Thanks to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Christine Ford, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Elon Musk, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading drafts of this. Such great company he keeps.