On Sam's part -- am I the only one who got the "heard this before" feeling? Obviously he attributed everything pretty appropriately, but I thought I could've placed 50-75% of his sentences in the "Summary" sections of various PG essays, Peter Thiel writings, and other luminaries of the startup-sphere.
I'm not saying it was wrong or that his delivery was bad. But I remember reading the Class Notes from Thiel's class after Blake made them available and thinking "Wow, there's some original thoughts in here I haven't come across before."
Maybe it's because PG already put it all to paper, and some of these other figures just added post scripts. Maybe it was a solved problem by the time Sam got a seat at the table. Just some food for thought. Looking forward to the other lectures regardless.
Surely, but for lecture 1 in a "Startup 101" series, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. We're talking about a very, very well documented path at this point, with established best practices.
I think on Sam Altman's part this is deliberate. He has distilled the core message of Grahamsian thought beautifully into slides. YC has been espousing this specific philosophy for a while, and I think Sam & PG both represent this school of thought.
This is part of the reason I believe PG picked Sam, he thought Sam internalized & helped form the YC approach to startups. The two are like Epicurus & Lucretius; Leucippus & Democritus.
I'm not saying it was wrong or that his delivery was bad. But I remember reading the Class Notes from Thiel's class after Blake made them available and thinking "Wow, there's some original thoughts in here I haven't come across before."
Maybe it's because PG already put it all to paper, and some of these other figures just added post scripts. Maybe it was a solved problem by the time Sam got a seat at the table. Just some food for thought. Looking forward to the other lectures regardless.