So what prompted this early fascination with Paul Graham and why have I spent hours of my day reciting Essays? It’s because of this fun term I’ve learned called Context.

Paul Graham is interesting for many reasons. He is impactful for three:

The idea of changing the way billions of dollars are directed.
Investing in batches
“Context”

Off the bat, in no way am I trying to downplay his career NOR am I agreeing with any point a modern Paul Graham has (especially politically.) But, I am arguing something that explains the modern Junior & Senior pressure that few have lived up to in the past 10 years; leaving the startup & venture ecosystem stale.

Changing Things.

As a reminder, to me, if I haven’t mentioned this already, Paul Graham was the guy that said “let’s invest in technical kids,” which was probably the most radical thing you could do at the time.

You’ve hopefully already read my nontechnical piece… to which you’d notice that this is (cringe to admit) the inspiration for the movement of time, money, and attention to a talent group that doesn’t yet know their worth.

It wasn’t until I started working around the MrBeast world and heard that he, too, required for his employees (hold on a minute) to move to NC if they wanted to work there. Any normal person (non-tech person) would say, “you know, that’s how jobs work,” but that is absolutely not the vibe, especially not 2024 vibe, of startup & content employment.

Scripture.

Ah - the dream that comes with the movement! Scripture. That’s the only way to describe PG’s Essays, or any YC content for that matter.