It&#x27;s sorta weird to read your comments because they have a certain lens on the world that&#x27;s very much at-odds with published stories about how YC actually got started.<p>They didn&#x27;t &quot;recruit&quot; RTM or TLB because they had specific skills that YC needed.  They asked them because PG, RTM, and TLB had previously founded Viaweb together, and so they <i>knew</i> they could work well together and all had shared history and cultural knowledge.  And then if you go back to the founding of Viaweb, PG and RTM started it because they were best friends at Harvard, well before RTM wrote the Morris Worm (indeed, if you read some of the news articles on the worm, PG is quoted).  TLB was brought on because they asked all their friends &quot;Who&#x27;s the smartest person you know?&quot;, Trevor&#x27;s name came up, and then when they met him, he rewrote their entire product in Smalltalk in 2 weeks.