Comment by omnimus
10 hours ago
Let's not forget url of this site is Ycombinator. As far as i know that is very far from “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”. It's more like “ambitious finance move fast and break things programmer”.
10 hours ago
Let's not forget url of this site is Ycombinator. As far as i know that is very far from “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”. It's more like “ambitious finance move fast and break things programmer”.
To be fair, Woz wasn't just a “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”, he was also the co-founder of one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. And YC is, in their own words: "The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.". They're not entirely unrelated.
He was a cofounder because of his skill and Jobs talking him into it. Woz would have been perfectly happy as an engineer at HP, that was his plan.
He wasn't entirely unworldly though. He didn't like BASIC as a language, but he gave the Apple I and II a BASIC capable of running the programs from Ahl's BASIC Computer Games because that's what the market was demanding.
You are right. But the real world is a messy place. Good people do bad things and vice versa. Not many people are entirely good or entirely bad.
HN is a very strong net positive IMO. YC could easily monetize it into oblivion. They don't.
Woz is a primary figure in one of YC’s essential texts. He has always been revered here as a founder and as a human.
https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...
"Tech Cofounder" who gets edged out before the next funding round.
i guess you mean ycombinator and not ycombinator… the combinator, which is very much the kind of hacker ethos this site (and pg’s idealized version of the entity) is supposed to embody.