why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religi… - Paul Graham

The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

Good founders are remarkably similar across both generations and domains. E.g. Zuck and Bill Gates are way more like one another than they are like their contemporaries.

One of the things that surprised me about YC is how long we continue to advise founders. We thought we'd just help them get started and then hand them over to later stage investors, but in fact we're still talking to founders 10 years in.

When someone's audience derives mostly from complaining about some narrow set of problems, they have less incentive to fix them, or even acknowledge progress other people make toward fixing them.