Just Be Rich

In fact, the Industrial Revolution that he claims to be the last "time of entrepreneurship" created the the Dickensian's work conditions and such a strong class divide that lead to the worker's revolutions of the 19th and early 20th century, to the corresponding fascist counter-revolutions, and to two world wars. It is precisely in the following "boring time" of Keynesianism and the cold-war that the west and "the second world" experienced the highest sustainable growth period ever and that the masses had access, for the firs time, to minimally decent working conditions to create that thing we call "the middle class".

So in fact, Graham is right in that we see now again, like in the Industrial Revolution, a simultaneity of great technological disruption combined with a hegemonic neo-liberal ideology. This is leading lead a new rise of world-wide hyper-concentrated capital, job instability, more and more limited access to basic goods like housing, climate catastrophe, and a new class of capitalists that believe that they are above any sense of morality.

There is nothing to celebrate here but more of the opposite: good reason to be really scared of the future to come.

Of course, any VC, accelerator, or angel investor who desires success is going to work hard to make their investments identity-blind. But you can’t ignore that a startup’s success is affected by the breadth and depth of the cofounder’s network. Given two startups with equal talent, wouldn’t it be wiser to pick the cofounders who are sons and daughters with deep connections to the rich and powerful rather than the sons and daughters with no network? Objectively this is probably a rare edge-case. But startups are notoriously hard to evaluate objectively — it almost seems like a throw of the dice. This dynamic only strengthens the temptation to make judgments based on identity, as it is an easy and accurate judgment to make — are you one of us?

A large part of YC’s success is that they were able to choose winners based on merit rather than identity, because PG and team’s domain knowledge was “what it takes to be a successful startup.”

Is that the case today, when YC highlights their Alum network as a significant benefit to their startups? Presumably, YC has built a network based on merit rather than identity. But is the network itself strong enough to resist the temptation of relying on easy identity-evaluation rather than on hard merit-identification? Concretely — will two YC companies enter into business with one another due to shared identity rather than on measured merit?

There’s something really fascinating and subtle occurring here: the assumed coupling of merit with identity. Just as a good VC will try to avoid the lazy-thinking of identity-bound evaluation, I’m sure the YC alums strive to evaluate one another without reference to their shared heritage. But the temptation for a YC startup to outsource their decision-making to identity is amplified by the cognitive dissonance of trusting in their own YC-identity-as-merit while being skeptical of the other alums.

The aspiration to evaluate merit rather than identity is great, and is part of what makes America feel special to itself. But seems to me to be quite difficult to live up to that aspiration.

Second question: What would it look like if the person wondering about this lived in a land that expressed very clearly that there are rules for thee, but not for me? Would not that make many of the assumptions of a solid baseline not solid at all? And make the attempt at living within this structure rather flimsy, at best?

As I attempt to navigate forward, I find that many of the previous base assumptions no longer hold true...