Now that I've been through being a kid, growing up, and then having kids, it's clear that the main thing that differentiates people is simply whether… - Paul Graham

There are now so many "accelerators" that I get spam from people making products for them. Very weird. I wrote all YC's original software, so every spam is either offering something I wrote, or something I didn't think was worth writing.

I used to think <person> was smart. Then I discovered that he disagrees with me about <political issue>, and I realized he couldn't be, because no one who disagrees with me about <political issue> could be smart.

It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more wealth than another. The key to this mystery is to revisit that question, are they really worth 100 of us? Would a basketball team trade one of their players for 100 random people? What would Apple’s next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people?6 These things don’t scale linearly. Perhaps the CEO or the professional athlete has only ten times (whatever that means) the skill and determination of an ordinary person. But it makes all the difference that it’s concentrated in one individual.