Sunday, March 20, 2005

Paul Graham, startups, and VCs

The latest essay from ubergeek Paul Graham is titled "A Unified Theory of VC Suckage".

Inflammatory title, to be sure, but the essay makes several good points. Paul's argument is similar to many of the points made by Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software fame) in his excellent post, "Fixing Venture Capital".

[via Andrew Chen]

Update: Looks like Paul Graham is putting his money where is mouth is. His new Summer Founders Program is a paid summer internship designed to build new startups. From their FAQ:
    We suspect that students, and particularly undergrads, are undervalued ... Our hypothesis is that many quite young hackers could start viable startups if someone just gave them enough seed money to develop a prototype. The Summer Founders Program is an experiment to test this hypothesis.
[via Joho]

Update: Joel and Paul did not go unnoticed by the VCs out there. Fred Wilson takes a conciliatory tone with his post, "We suck less". But Jeff Nolan gets out the big guns and flames entrepreneurs, Joel Spolsky, and just about everyone else. Kaboom! All very amusing.

Update: Seven months later, Paul Graham posts about the mostly positive results of the first Summer Founders Program.

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