Hey, MI-6! It's Time To Turn Paul Graham (If You Haven't Already)
And other stray thoughts about Y Combinator
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I recently got into a back and forth with Paul Graham when I pointed out — correctly — that Graham and his wife Jessica are absentee founders of Y-Combinator now that they’ve decamped to his native Britain. Who knows what they’re really doing there.
Of course la famille Graham, Altman and Y-Combinator all told conflicting stories about Altman’s time at Y-Combinator to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post a week or so ago. You know what they say: “Never e-meet your heroes.”
That’s the heuristic I’m using when I think through Y Combinator. It’s a front designed to harvest the young people. To get those young people to apply it needs a certain panache so it needs marketing in the form of Paul Graham’s essays. Someone once told me that the first thing every startup needs to do is sell the idea of a startup in the first place. Most of us don’t work in that sort of job. We prefer the more “safe” options of working for Corporate America or even the government.
It’s gauche but I think it tells you a lot about someone when you know what their dad did for a living.
Annie Altman and her brothers, including Sam. Are they a mob family?
Paul Graham is the English son of a physicist while Sam Altman is the Midwestern Jewish son of a real estate developer.
You might think of the differences between the two men as spotting versus leveraging, insight versus networking. Graham spotted the companies; Altman brought the mob cash. Together they built the consumer companies. More on that in a moment.
A friend of mine loves to quote Paul Graham and she and I were talking and I realized just how comparatively little was known about the enigmatic Englishman. Quite odd, I thought. Check for yourself. Graham’s birthday isn’t even on Wikipedia. Not that you should trust everything you saw on Wikipedia.
Graham is the son of a physicist but also the grand son of chief inspector of the Metropolitan police. Think Sherlock Holmes. Graham is, in other words, something of a spotter. His rather voluminous writings give you a sense of a facile mind.
I myself am fond of Graham’s “What You Can’t Say” January 2004 essay which I’ve read a few times over the years. Unfortunately Graham himself seemingly doesn’t tend to take seriously when it comes to the real story of many Silicon Valley companies. You might think think of this Substack as something of a corrective — giving you the real history of so many fronts, frauds, and phonies out and about. Free Paul Graham!
Graham could turn to writing once his company Viaweb was acquired during the heady days of Yahoo! domination and I’ve always thought of Jerry Yang as the Chinese cash trying to get in on America after the Cold War. Interestingly Yang is now a backer of Semafor that weird Chisraeli publication backed by Likud asset Ben Smith of BuzzFeed infamy. How strange indeed. Maybe we’ll get to the bottom of all of that in the Oxy Media lawsuit.
Graham’s cofounders at Viaweb were Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. Morris is a fascinating figure as he is both the son of none other than Robert Morris Sr., chief scientist of the NSA, and he was the first person convicted for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (He got probation and community service.) Today Morris is a tenure professor at MIT, which has its own problems. The Canadian-born Blackwell became a partner at Y Combinator but has more or less been a nonentity.
Y Combinator has since passed on to Gary Tan who is from overseas Chinese stock. Tan is currently trying to change San Francisco politics. And well, good luck.
Tan isn’t a fan (ha! I rhymed) of yours truly because I called out how Zionist he was. One of the big surprises from October 7th has been how thoroughly penetrated Silicon Valley is. Tan imagines a San Francisco that’s safe and under law and order but in reality they’re just swapping one mobster clique for another. A way I’ve come to think of San Francisco is the mobster real estate haven where tech people are gouged with higher real estate prices.
There are lots of mob cities in America and the denizens of them move easily between them.
Our friends in St. Louis oftentimes point out how much of a mob city the “Gateway to the West” is. In recent years the “Gateway to the West” has really become a gateway to the Middle East and the Far East. This simply won’t do but it is revealing where the cash came from for St. Louis son Sam Altman who is seemingly one of the more powerful tech figures now that Thiel was collared.
Eric Garland writes about all the mob racketeering and real estate hustles and it’s easy to see Altman’s father, Jerry, as one of those Midwestern hustlers as he partnered with the deeply corrupt Roberts Brothers. Many of these community groups on whose board Jerry Altman sat act as fronts for organized crime. “Civil rights” is often a cover for uncivil wrongs.
Altman the son could invest alongside Y-Combinator in Y-Combinator portfolio batches with that real estate cash. How engaged Altman is with all of his “investments” remains anyone’s guess.
I suspect we will learn that there’s all kind of weird stuff going on.
Graham could really do us all a solid by being the sort of person he pretended to be in his columns. That would take guts. And he has that. Nassim Taleb and I gave him plaudits for being one of the few VCs to call for a cease fire.
But the next bit is going to prove a bit more challenging. Maybe the British intelligence services could give him a hand? I’m sure they can find him at his quaint English country home.