Balzac's pronouncement assumes the world is zero-sum; ie that wealth must be stolen from others. While that may have been true of many fortunes for many centuries on earth, it is not true now. The essence of Silicon Valley is the positive-sum game. Paul's at the heart of it.
Paul has done a lot of good for a lot of people, including the founders who went through YC, which is why people pay attention to his opinions.
Giving $10k out to each founding team in the first year of YC wasn't laundering luck into status. (I doubt he cares about status.) It was changing how tech investing worked in order to liberate more tech people to recombine with each other in order to work on hard problems.
There aren't many great fortunes, they usually require dominating an industry (say, come to be one of top 5 vendors out of industry that initially had 10,000 competitors), and I think it's pretty unrealistic to believe you could dominate an industry without getting your hands dirty. There may be exceptions like Warren Buffet, but I think the dark path is much more common.
This is simply untrue. The number of great fortunes itself has vastly increased in tech's positive-sum economy. The increase in the number of multi-millionaires, and the growth of that class, has been deeply impacted by tech. And it's not just founders. Lots of execs and senior software engineers now possess fortunes that past ages would have considered great, even in real vs nominal dollars.
Not all industries are winner take all. And many industries remain to be invented by founders.
This fortune == crime is part of a scarcity mindset, and it's a shame that limits people.
Balzac's pronouncement assumes the world is zero-sum; ie that wealth must be stolen from others. While that may have been true of many fortunes for many centuries on earth, it is not true now. The essence of Silicon Valley is the positive-sum game. Paul's at the heart of it.
Paul has done a lot of good for a lot of people, including the founders who went through YC, which is why people pay attention to his opinions.
Giving $10k out to each founding team in the first year of YC wasn't laundering luck into status. (I doubt he cares about status.) It was changing how tech investing worked in order to liberate more tech people to recombine with each other in order to work on hard problems.