This is in theory. In practice, a worse product with more money and louder marketing easily wins against a better product nobody knows about. I'm sure Paul perfectly understands it.

There are other idealizations I won't comment on, but the whole piece reads like an attempt to nurture an application pipeline for YC rather than the genuine writing I liked in earlier Paul's essays.

Here is an alternative point of view: get your degree and work for a few years. Then go back to university to learn business basics (finance, marketing, management). Start a company in your late 30s, when you know your subject area well and you have an idea how to steer finance/marketing (marketing is much harder that it might seem). Bootstrap or take as little investment as possible until you get PMF. Then scale up without giving away (much) equity.

It worked well for me. It can surely work well for others.

Brand new industries don’t have depth, and may not even have high difficulty and so starting a SAAS business or Social Media startup 2008-2014 was easy from a technical point of view

The difficult in it being a ‘startup’ was more about business execution than building execution. And luck of course. Hence Harvard students applying to become founders

Now the craftsmanship involved in building novel solutions in complex domains that are not new requires deep knowledge.

Hence PHDs and Postdocs, which are projects, but projects that rely on existing knowledge.

Paul thinking of founders being a replacement for grad school is a result of his experience building startups in low complexity novel industries with large financial upside.

That’s not what a nation needs to move itself forward. It is what VCs need to generate alpha, and so you’ll see exploration in novel low complexity industries with large financial upside, and not hard science - so Harvard grads make sense.

This idea that ‘builders’ are ‘builders’ misses the need for craftsmanship and apprenticeship

I'm not fond of this kind of math metaphor. "roughly" is doing a lot of work here. He's saying that richer founders are more inspirational than poorer founders and younger founders are more inspirational than older founders. But when you put it that way, it's so obvious that maybe it's not worth saying. So he cast it as an equation:

inspiration = wealth / age-diff

But you can't take this equation literally. I mean, what if the founder is younger than the students? Do you get negative inspiration? What happens if you divide by 0? Is inspiration undefined in that case? Is a $2 billion net-worth 30-year-old really twice as inspirational as a $1 billion net-worth at the same age? Is Elon Musk 10 times more inspirational than Bill Gates?

This is excessive, and unjustified precision. Save equations for actual equations.

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham, and I only criticize because he is worth criticizing. Please don't block me.

It grossly blurs the distinction between those who put in personal blood, sweat, tears, and money into starting a business versus those who make a few slides so they can use other people’s money to hire others to do all the work and come up with all the ideas.

Today, everyone is a founder. Founders of bubbles and bro culture. Herd-minds, chasing the Californian greed rush. Round 'em up, Angel Investors!