Of the three, when you analyze them, I genuinely think the Paypal strain has been the most corrosive to the internet and to society as a whole, overall. The attitudes that started there have poisoned a lot of what "standard practice" in tech is. So one of the times when that thought experiment of "you have a time machine that will let your current self replace the consciousness of your past self at any point in your own personal timeline, with all your current, present-day knowledge including advance notice of the time travel so you have time to memorize anything you want or think would be useful, but without any other additional resources: what point on your own personal timeline would you choose to move back into" was going around on social media, I thought about it for a few minutes and then realized, holy shit, my personal timeline is such that if I go back to middle school or so and set up the correct conditions, by the time I turn 18 I can start the ball rolling to beat PayPal to market by about a year or so. There aren't many other problems with The World Today that I could plausibly have a route to personally influence the causal factors, but if I know exactly the correct moves to make and I go back far enough to set myself up for success, I absolutely could take PayPal out at the knees before it got a hold.
Silicon Valley would look a lot different if I were the one setting the vibe instead of ex-PayPal folks, let's just say.
no subject
* the one from the original Netscape IPO (which gave us Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz founding Andreessen Horowitz)
* the one from Confinity and X (first incarnation) merging to form PayPal (which gave us Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman, Steve Chen, Jack Selby, Keith Rabois, Luke Nosek, Dave McClure, etc, etc, the list of people who went on to have massive influence is huge)
* the one that came out of Viaweb (which gave us Paul Graham and Y Combinator).
Of the three, when you analyze them, I genuinely think the Paypal strain has been the most corrosive to the internet and to society as a whole, overall. The attitudes that started there have poisoned a lot of what "standard practice" in tech is. So one of the times when that thought experiment of "you have a time machine that will let your current self replace the consciousness of your past self at any point in your own personal timeline, with all your current, present-day knowledge including advance notice of the time travel so you have time to memorize anything you want or think would be useful, but without any other additional resources: what point on your own personal timeline would you choose to move back into" was going around on social media, I thought about it for a few minutes and then realized, holy shit, my personal timeline is such that if I go back to middle school or so and set up the correct conditions, by the time I turn 18 I can start the ball rolling to beat PayPal to market by about a year or so. There aren't many other problems with The World Today that I could plausibly have a route to personally influence the causal factors, but if I know exactly the correct moves to make and I go back far enough to set myself up for success, I absolutely could take PayPal out at the knees before it got a hold.
Silicon Valley would look a lot different if I were the one setting the vibe instead of ex-PayPal folks, let's just say.