Great essay. Besides setting the record straight on Jessica&#x27;s key role in the founding and growth of YC, it also offers a rare glimpse into how and why YC became the juggernaut it is today.<p>&quot;The overall atmosphere was shockingly different from a VC&#x27;s office on Sand Hill Road, in a way that was entirely for the better.&quot;<p>The rest of the essay is filled with words like family, mom, character, culture, authenticity, good(ness), social radar etc. Words you would hardly ever associate with a successful business - let alone a big time, successful VC firm on Sand Hill Road or anywhere else. It sounds like a crazy way to run a company based on such fuzzy concepts. But remarkably, these soft, fuzzy concepts appear to be a key part of YC&#x27;s huge success - and not some cold, calculated decision making. In a way this bears out one of PG&#x27;s other theories - that hugely successful startups usually start out with ideas that look really bad or crazy. And in YC&#x27;s case, the most successful startup to come out of YC may be regarded as YC itself!<p>Edit: Would like to add a key part of their approach seems to have been to throw out the old, tried and true approach, think from first principles and build the company and culture in a way that they felt comfortable with - and not how it was &quot;supposed to be done&quot;.