Paul Graham: observation

Transcript context

…But Jessica knew it was different, right? You’re not aware. Famous people don’t know how famous they are, unless they’re experts on it, like movie stars or something like that. They’re always basically taken by surprise. We were especially taken by surprise because the thing is, the companies we funded would grow until they had thousands of employees, but YC itself didn’t grow. YC’s market-wise — the value of the portfolio grew with these giant companies, but we didn’t see it. We were still just a few people doing the same thing we’d always been doing, so how could we be famous? I discovered that was one of the biggest mistakes I made with YC. I didn’t realize how many people were watching us. I thought we could just keep doing what we were doing, and nothing really mattered. Why was that a mistake, per se? Maybe it was better being oblivious.…

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