A useful technique to head off such misunderstandings is to ask the person who disagrees to pick out a particular sentence or passage they believe is false.

"But one thing that may save them to some extent is the uneven distribution of startup outcomes: practically all the returns are concentrated in a few big successes. The expected value of a startup is the percentage chance it's Google." [It is your inclusion of this sentence that caused me to characterize your change of heart about it as "grudging."]

"Most data structures exist because of speed. For example, many languages today have both strings and lists. Semantically, strings are more or less a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. So why do you need a separate data type? You don't, really. Strings only exist for efficiency. But it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language with hacks to make programs run faster. Having strings in a language seems to be a case of premature optimization." [Processing strings is a huge part of today's computing landscape. There are premature optimizations to be sure, but efficient string processing isn't one of them IMHO.]

"But it was mysterious to me that the super-angels would quibble about valuations. Did they not understand that the big returns come from a few big successes, and that it therefore mattered far more which startups you picked than how much you paid for them?" [The implication here is that because picking the right companies matters more, then it doesn't make sense to "quibble" over valuations. But this is a false dichotomy. Picking the right companies matters, of course. But valuation matters as well, and questioning a ~10M valuation for a company that has no revenue is not "quibbling."]

"... jerks who give you lines like "come back to me to fill out the round." [I have no problem with advising founders to avoid wasting time on reluctant investors. I do have a problem with impugning their motives and character.]

If you really want to engage in a debate about this I will hold up my end. But to be perfectly honest, I'd just as soon see this bruhaha fade into obscurity. It has already gotten much more attention that it deserves IMHO.

1. I explained later that expected value is not what matters, but rate of return. (And obviously the sentence about Google, as phrased, is a joke. Taken literally it would imply every other company had an expected value of zero. If I believed that I would be wasting my time with YC.)

2. Whether programs process strings and whether they're visible in your source code are separate questions.

3. That passage explains my thinking as I was figuring out the part I explained next.

4. There is definitely a subset of opportunistic investors whose motives and character deserve to be impugned. As I said, it's a proper subset of those who invest late.

> If I believed that I would be wasting my time with YC.

Not at all. YC gives you incredible leverage to diversify your portfolio, making it that much more likely that you would have a piece of the next Google.

> obviously the sentence about Google, as phrased, is a joke

It's clearly hyperbole, but there's a difference between hyperbole and a joke. You've said many times you believe the outcome of early stage investing is bimodal. In your Startup School talk you even made a point of saying you "did the math" that led you to this conclusion. You said you didn't even start to question this conclusion until you started writing the talk for the last startup school. And this seems to be as close as you get to retreating from that conclusion:

"So I think at least some super-angels are looking for companies that will get bought. That's the only rational explanation for focusing on getting the right valuations, instead of the right companies. And if so they'll be different to deal with than VCs. They'll be tougher on valuations, but more accomodating if you want to sell early."

This is the passage I referred to as "grudging acknowledgement." A non-grudging acknowledgement would have gone something like this: "Because angels do not operate under the same constraints that VC's do, it opens the door to exit strategies that VC's are not able to undertake because of the constraints they operate under. This has the potential to change everything, including the current bi-modal distribution of outcomes, which is caused at least in part by the fact that VC's have to hew to a schedule and can't reinvest proceeds from early exits. So you as founders might be able to provide very nice ROI's for your investors without really dramatic wins, as long as you can add value quickly and reliably." Or something like that.

> Whether programs process strings and whether they're visible in your source code are separate questions.

Of course surface syntax and internal representations are separate issues. I challenge the claim that "it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language with hacks to make programs run faster." The semantics of the language determine, for example, whether strings are mutable, whether it's possible to take the CDR of a string, whether taking the Nth element of a string is an O(1) operation or an O(n) operation. "Cluttering up the semantics with hacks to make program run faster" could save you a lot of money, and is therefore not "lame." The chances that it will save you a lot of money is proportional to how successful you are.

> There is definitely a subset of opportunistic investors whose motives and character deserve to be impugned.

OK, but maybe you should draw the distinction a little more specifically, particularly when your audience is a bunch of aspiring first-time founders. It is very easy to interpret what you said as, "Anyone who gives you this line is [very likely to be? almost certain to be?] a jerk."

I have a hunch it was the "assholes" comment that set you off, and led you to going back through a mental list of things he'd said that you disagreed with. For what it's worth, I think the original meaning behind that comment was clear, and that pg is now splitting a really fine hair in defending it.

More broadly, that comment comes across as symptomatic of a peculiar attitude among some startups and programmers towards investors, angels, and other "business" people.

Regardless of the intended meaning, there was no reason to use that word there. It didn't enforce or strengthen any point; putting "investors" in its place does the job just as well.

We want to be looked upon as smart and as having thoughts worth saying. One of the fast ways to do this is to beat another smart person in a rhetorical fight. But smart people are hard to beat in such fights because, being smart, they tend to think correct thoughts. Therefore we have a subconscious motivation to misread them and fight against what they did not say. This is the only way someone without extraordinarily high amounts of expertise and insight can "win" against Paul Graham in his primary domain of thought. There's a real social pressure for people who comment on other people's thoughts to create straw-man lookalikes of the thoughts rather than to address the thoughts themselves.