Exactly. Productivity only matters when it's directed properly. A brilliant MIT student working 20 hour days on some silly mash-up is not nearly as productive as a slow and obtuse engineer in some large corporation working 6 hours days. It's the results that count.
I would argue the contrary case to Paul's; I think that Silicon Valley has slowed down growth. They make it a lottery that you can win with having a cool, quick hit. The money in the valley has little love for hard problems and a lot of love for fads, much like record producers.
This sounds nice in theory, but I don't think it is always true. There are techies who have a career and those who have a job. It is better to get as many who have a job doing what they are passionate about, because they are probably wasting their time at their job.
And I wish that at least one of the 100+ companies that have come out of YC were IPO bound. I tried to hint that we were of that mindset when we had applied, no cigar. I'm not really sure why YC continues to advance sites which seem to go against their own "Derivative Idea" rule for why startups fail (e.g. this round: a group bookmarking site, a themed video site which piggybacks on YouTube). It would be interesting if YC decided to have one round where they choose nothing but "hard problems" with huge potential.
I couldn't agree more about YC. The application questions would change to "we're only interested in single founders, but we will consider a technical co-founder." I think it also just makes sense for the "spray and pay" style to fund 1000 startups focusing on hard problems with the potential of 1 making up for it all.
When we hit it, dbul, you and I can put this together. Deal? :-)
I would argue the contrary case to Paul's; I think that Silicon Valley has slowed down growth. They make it a lottery that you can win with having a cool, quick hit. The money in the valley has little love for hard problems and a lot of love for fads, much like record producers.