Paul Graham  reflects on his summer Y Combinator

on Age:

More precisely, the hypothesis was that success in a startup depends mainly on how smart and energetic you are, and much less on how old you are or how much business experience you have.

A researcher who studied the SFP startups said the one thing they had in common was that they all worked ridiculously hard.

on Competition:

Here’s a handy rule for startups: competitors are rarely as dangerous as they seem. Most will self-destruct before you can destroy them. And it certainly doesn’t matter how many of them there are, any more than it matters to the winner of a marathon how many runners are behind him.

Nature of Founders :

They wouldn’t (well, seven of the eight groups wouldn’t) be interested in making money by speculating in stocks. They want to make something people use.

**Future of hackers :
**If I’m right, “hacker” will mean something different in twenty years than it does now. Increasingly it will mean the people who run the company. Y Combinator is just accelerating a process that would have happened anyway. Power is shifting from the people who deal with money to the people who create technology, and if our experience this summer is any guide, this will be a good thing.

I am sure any teenager reading this article would be kicked , and would definitely prefer a startup to working for a company