I don't know you, Matt, and I certainly don't have a beef with Paul Graham - I have much respect for him. But, the specific components of your encomium do not recommend you. More specifically:
> That he started the seed funding movement?
Um, people were doing seed rounds before YC. For like, decades. They weren't blogging about it, because there was no HTTP and HTML and always-on broadband, but crikey, how the hell do you think half of silicon valley started?
> That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups?
I don't even know what this means. Every true startup is fundamentally a hack; it's probing at the boundary of the risk frontier. (I'm not talking about those VC dice rolls on the flavor du jour, manifest as a bunch of brogrammers with zero understanding of the time value of their own risk profile.)
For "hack startups <v.>" to make sense, one would have to infer a new usage of the word "startups", namely, to refer to the pattern-matching herd mentality of tech VC dealmaking and The Great Game of Deal Flow. Partially driven by real opportunity and partially driven by the wealthy exodus from equity markets in a post-HFT world, the modern funding bubble has led to a difficult climate for seed-stage companies, and Paul & YC are merely taking advantage of that impedance mismatch between them and traditional VCs. But to imply that there is some fundamental new structure that Paul discovered with YC is absurd. Incubators & incubation is a decades-old concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_incubator
> Before lean startup existed?
The term "lean startup" started being popularized in 2011 by Eric Ries. This is less than three years ago. There are innumerable things older than this. Actually, there are few truly noteworthy things in the technology space that cannot be described as existing "before lean startup".
> That he's written his own dialect of LISP?
I think many LISPers have done this. Isn't the whole point of LISP to write your own dialect of it for each problem?
Anyways, I just wanted to point out that your list is not very impressive at all, and the fact that they impress you doesn't really reflect well on you.
1. He has extremely well-written essays on technology and business. Being able to think clearly and articulate cogently in this space is a rare skill, and I have deep respect for those who possess it. Joel Spolsky (who I also respect) is much more verbose than PG. Few tech writers achieve the level clarity of expression that Paul does in his writing, and he achieves it while writing about difficult and subtle things.
2. He has mentored a great many startups. Granted, he gets his pound of equity for cheap cheap but nonetheless this devotion so the cause of helping other geeks start companies is very admirable. Note that this is not the same thing as what the parent poster claimed: "hacking startups" and "starting the seed funding movement".
Also, building HackerNews is a very cool badge of honor but frankly it is nowhere near as sophisticated as Reddit (c'mon, "Unknown or Expired link" and hellbanning?). The fact that there is a driving function behind pageviews to it makes it a go-to place in the tech world, but the technology and codebase of HN itself is not anything terribly impressive.
> That he started the seed funding movement?
Um, people were doing seed rounds before YC. For like, decades. They weren't blogging about it, because there was no HTTP and HTML and always-on broadband, but crikey, how the hell do you think half of silicon valley started?
> That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups?
I don't even know what this means. Every true startup is fundamentally a hack; it's probing at the boundary of the risk frontier. (I'm not talking about those VC dice rolls on the flavor du jour, manifest as a bunch of brogrammers with zero understanding of the time value of their own risk profile.)
For "hack startups <v.>" to make sense, one would have to infer a new usage of the word "startups", namely, to refer to the pattern-matching herd mentality of tech VC dealmaking and The Great Game of Deal Flow. Partially driven by real opportunity and partially driven by the wealthy exodus from equity markets in a post-HFT world, the modern funding bubble has led to a difficult climate for seed-stage companies, and Paul & YC are merely taking advantage of that impedance mismatch between them and traditional VCs. But to imply that there is some fundamental new structure that Paul discovered with YC is absurd. Incubators & incubation is a decades-old concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_incubator
> Before lean startup existed?
The term "lean startup" started being popularized in 2011 by Eric Ries. This is less than three years ago. There are innumerable things older than this. Actually, there are few truly noteworthy things in the technology space that cannot be described as existing "before lean startup".
> That he's written his own dialect of LISP?
I think many LISPers have done this. Isn't the whole point of LISP to write your own dialect of it for each problem?
Anyways, I just wanted to point out that your list is not very impressive at all, and the fact that they impress you doesn't really reflect well on you.