Please reread the essay. She was not &quot;a girlfriend with an English degree&quot; he &quot;brought on to handle marketing.&quot;<p><i>&gt; Y Combinator is fundamentally a nexus of people, like a university. It doesn&#x27;t make a product. What defines it is the people. Jessica more than anyone curated and nurtured that collection of people. In that sense she literally made YC.</i><p>You seem to be assuming that pg wrote this essay to boost YC&#x27;s reputation. Actually it feels like he wrote it to correct an injustice. A large one, I&#x27;d add, considering it&#x27;s gone on for most of a decade.