It's not "AI light bulbs", the point is to use smart meters for load shedding and load rearranging. Why wouldn't you want for people and companies to be able to use cheaper electricity in off-peak hours?
Out of 6,500 companies YC funded companies, less than 0.40% amounted to anything. Do you really want to apply to YC with these success rate? The issue is that these 30 billionaires PG decided to highlight, none of their 14 companies, from which less than half are even profitable right now...are relevant at all. No civilization level breakthroughs, they are mostly payment layers, delivery apps, marketplaces, crypto exchanges, and labor or regulatory arbitrage, and attention platforms.
If Airbnb, DoorDash, Instacart, Coinbase, Reddit, Brex, Deel, or Flexport disappeared tomorrow, humanity would not lose a vaccine, a new energy source, a scientific discovery, or a cure for disease. We would mostly switch apps.
Only depressing aspect is pretending jackpot level, private wealth, equals meaningful progress. There is a reason not once, he used the word entrepreneur in the essay...
To expand on this: certain people have learned how to capitalize on “nerdiness” - i.e. how to virtue signal in a way so that investors and general public treat you like an engineering genius.
Elizabeth Holmes persuaded for years that she was a groundbreaking innovator, even with non-existent product. Other manipulators are smart enough to have a real product that protects them via benefit of a doubt. Society is still not immune to people like that.
The original sin is earlier, when people with a dream and a million dollars were dubbed Hackers. And then articles like these calls these Stanford and Harvard guys nerds. Have they ever seen a true computer nerd, you know, the type of people that can actually write code and are not just paying other people to?
LOL....I just went trough the experience of trying to buy a bus ticket, at the Machines of DB in Munich Airport. I challenged two German citizens, who were kind enough to help, and they could not manage.
I think a YT Video about it would take on millions on views. Oh and the bus,no cards...debit or credit...only cash...oh wait...only coins.
German precision...the fairytale adults tell mechanics.
Can you even buy bus tickets via dbahn? Buses are local, they are different systems. FWIW you’re better off using the mobile apps than trying to use the machines
You are supposed to, and I managed only with the help of sending each screen to an LLM, while in English, but the English of the machines is broken.
For example when it gets the moment to pay in German, there would be a link to pay, but it wont enable the pin machine because it says in English "pay via association". You have to be an half genius to understand they are referring in English, via a broken translation, to The Munich Transport and Tariff Association (MVV) that provides the overarching framework for local public transport in Munich, but of course you wont have their card.
Oh and despite taking the money ok, when the machine prints the ticket, the machine fails to print the bar code in 60% of the cases...
The online info says you can go to the DB counter, and request them to print you a card with the proper bar code, that the bus inspectors need to scan. After 20 minutes on the queue, the most arrogant employee there refused to do it, laughed and said it was not worth it, as the machines fail to print the bar code 50% of the time. It gets you a "Barcodedruck fehlgeschlagen" message in the ticket, so the controls at the bus are forced to ignore it ...or they can decide to give you a fine...German precision my a#%"#&
On yeah and they will give you a fine. The number of times I have been stopped by police for driving my bike (pedal bike, not motor or electric) in a criminal way!! Oh my, like not having enough lights on it. Or driving it 3 inches outside of the walking lines in denmark. Lol good job police. That is another thing we have in Europe bike stopping police... Lol it is hilarious... But the size of the fine is not. I had to pay around 200 dollars for not following the little lines on the road.
In most EU countries if your company went bankrupt, you are not allowed to open another one. Think about that for a little bit.
The Southern Countries are parasitically living from EU funds and EU programs, including money transfer for the budgets. The rich countries are desperately seeing China eating their lunch in Cars and all the rest.
Add to this the aging population, and now having the head under the sand on AI, and it does not look pretty...
You dont have a clue, and are showing EU regulations made by funcionaires that most countries simply ignore.
Here is an example of the current situation in Luxembourg for example, where the EU Court is based! They want you to clean up your debts first, well you would not go bankrupt if you could no? And if you look at the remaining conditions for the so called second chance they are impossible to achieve.
In the Netherlands restarting after bankruptcy is possible, but not automatic. The bankruptcy trustee determines whether the business can restart, and restart may be impossible if it harms creditors...
Spain excludes or limits discharge for some public debts and certain debtors...
Ireland and Austria completely ignored the law you quoted and currently have infringement procedures...see you in a few years...
Poland did not apply at all the law you mentioned, and had been criticized by the EU but nothing was made about it until now...
There are differences between being on the field, or knowing how to do a google search...
Living in EU so I am biased but I agree with this. You have to clean your debt or real people suffer.
Here is a real example: open a company, buy a small piece of land, section it in smaller pieces, promise you build houses, get people downpayments in cash, syphon all money to other companies with having contracts just a bit bigger than average market price, declare bankruptcy, then start again. You of course have smaller stakes in those other companies.
I think that's unfair to "vibe coding". If anybody explicitly claims to vibe coding something than they are admitting to low supervision of the code. And on the contrary you can also AI-produce code that you have supervised highly. I suppose there are people who both AI their code and push it as bespoke but I, for one, have not met such a person at our outside of work.
This makes no sense. Railroads were the core infrastructure and collected tolls from the economy. And at least one third of railroad companies went bankrupt in the 1890...
SpaceX is a company supposedly that would burn this while its "AI revenue" comes from renting broken compute, [1] to the people actually leading AI.
That is like BMW renting its factories to Toyota and then bragging that BMW is about to dominate the auto industry.
If we assume that YC funded about 6,500 companies and produced about 30 billionaires...That is 0.46% using the most flattering denominator possible. And the best reason not to apply to YC.
If you count individual founders, the rate is even lower. So to insinuate this is some kind of training people to become billionaires, is like a lottery operator saying he teaches wealth creation because a few ticket buyers hit the jackpot.
PG is turning an extreme power law outcome into a moral argument. A tiny fraction of founders capture enormous upside, thousands do not, and PG presents the winners as proof that the system is fair. I could not think of more survivorship bias with a halo.
And thee political sneer is also absurd. Startups do not exist outside politics. They exist( or should exist) inside law, tax, infrastructure, courts, labor rules, housing rules, securities law, immigration policy, and government procurement. Uber S-1 warned that its business would be harmed if drivers were classified as employees rather than independent contractors...and described legal and regulatory obstacles as material business risks. In other words...regulatory arbitrage ( corruption? ) as a business model.
Airbnb is an even cleaner YC example. Its own filings describe short term rental law, host registration, tax collection, fines, city restrictions, and New York 2023 rules as materially affecting the business. Its a business that lives lives inside a fight over housing law and local regulation.
And if the claim is that politicians do not understand value creation, then SpaceX is a hilarious counterexample. SpaceX is a company completely entangled with the state and US tax payer.
SpaceX has about $22B in government contracts, mostly NASA, and Reuters separately reported a $5.9B Space Force launch award in 2025.
And the biggest logic failure being used here is the so called exponential growth part. The world is not exponential. Population growth is not exponential forever. Demand is not exponential forever. Restaurants, supermarkets, apartments, drivers, cities, and disposable income are finite. Real markets saturate. Growth curves become S curves. Pretending that 15% monthly growth can simply continue for years is nothing more than spreadsheet intoxication.
So instead of the claim you can earn a billion by making users happy, what is reality is, that in a legal and financial system that massively rewards scalable equity ownership, a tiny number of founders can become billionaires if capital, timing, network effects, labor structure, regulation, and distribution all break their way. I don’t think its legal, and the best PG could do with this is a defense of the casino by pointing at the jackpot winners.
Just reflect on this: Of the 30 billionaires Paul Graham talks about, in an essay where, notably, he never once uses the word “entrepreneur” they come from these 14 companies:
Less than half of them are profitable as of 2026. None created a vaccine or cured a disease, discovered a new algorithm or mathematical theorem, developed the economies of poorer countries, created a new engine, or invented a renewable energy source. If all of them...disappeared tomorrow...you would probably just use some other payment system, maybe with higher or lower commissions, and argue on some other message board not called Reddit.
The impact on human lives would be zero... or maybe even slightly positive.
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