Sorry, but I am cynical about the article and its motivations.

A venture capitalist isn't generally going to be satisfied with one of their investments discovering they prefer running as a lifestyle business instead of a potential multi-billion dollar company.

The VC has an interest in the aggregate success of their portfolio more than particular startups within it. Advice is going to be oriented towards that goal - they'd rather have 99 failures and 1 Facebook over 100 $1M sustainable lifestyle businesses.

"Work as hard as you did in YC" is great and all, but I really don't think it's possible for most folks long-term.

YC is not a VC. More importantly, YC is especially known for not blocking founders' wishes or interests. This has been true since forever and is one thing that attracted me as a founder to YC. It may be hard for you to believe, but YC was started by deeply decent people who understand all too well what being a founder is like, and Sam is squarely in that tradition.

I'm not saying you can't be cynical or feel what you feel. I'm saying that cynicism also should have a bar to clear. Painting everything black leaves everything black for everyone. That's intellectual vandalism. It wrecks the discussion in its vicinity, and ultimately wrecks the community, because people who don't like wet black paint all over everything will just leave.

What is the minimal bar that cynicism should clear? Addressing a strong version of what it's critiquing, rather than lazily picking a weak version in order to get straight to sniping. That's the Principle of Charity, and it's basic to intellectual honesty. Why should cynicism get a free pass just because of how it feels? If you had considered that bar before commenting, you couldn't have posted what you did.

I don't at all mean to pick on you personally and I hope I'm not coming across that way. This is a systemic question and I care about its systemic effects on HN. What you posted was no worse than what many people post, and that's the problem.

Dismissive, sure. And Sam's article is trivial and condescending.

"Work smarter" is a vague, cliche platitude.

Of course it's a cliché—that's my point: if you must reduce this to a cliché, "smarter" would have been fairer than "harder". (What I originally wrote was "you picked the wrong half of the cliché," but I edited that out as too abrasive.)

Sam's article is far from trivial and far from condescending. What he wrote about is real and huge. Part of the difficulty of talking about it is that, when you put it into words, it sounds like a truism. Who would choose "fake work"? You'd think no one. Yet in practice, lots do. Not doing it is much, much harder than it sounds.

It's fine for someone not to know the problem well enough to appreciate this distinction. What's not fine is to rush for an excuse to call things "trivial and condescending". The difference for HN is important—basically the difference between a drinkable well and a poisoned one.

Real, huge and pretty vague. I'd almost say the author wasn't being charitable to the founders.

He says "I tell founders to consider how directly a task relates to growing. Obviously, building and selling are the best."

Well, many of the complaint list he has are arguably orientated towards building and selling. So I could be charitable and say he's trying to say that they're doing much of what they need to be doing but doing it wrong.

Well, that's the nature of all work and isn't greatly helpful or insightful. In detail, exactly, how is one supposed to scale if your technical debt and demo is a mess? How do I do PR correctly? How do I hire and build a team capable of rapid expansion? How do I know how much money is enough or wasting my time (my part-time accountant says we have enough money for 4 weeks...)? What do I do when a certified letter comes in from another company claiming patent infringement and I'd catagorized hiring a lawyer an obviously low requirement? Why is cult-of-personality always a bad thing (let's see a study on startup success between milquetoast founders and media savvy personalities)? Personalities make all the difference in the business world.

Which is why this opinion piece is given the gravitas that it is. But I'd honestly be more charitable to the founder in the trench and consider that YC is doing a poor job of preparing founders for... reality.

I'm using the word "charitable" in the specialized sense of "replying to the strongest form of an argument", as described by the link upthread.

Your comment isn't flippant (well, at least not until the wild non sequitur at the very end). That puts it on the right side of the most important line. I still don't think it counts as charitable, though, because your criticisms don't engage the meat of the post. I was hoping to write a detailed reply about that, but alas there's no time.