Spent most of this evening reading YC applications. We ask applicants to record themselves for about a minute with their cofounders just so we can get a sense for who they are in person. We fire up that video the second we start reading an application, usually. In the YouTube post-roll of suggested video, I found this gem -- a 20 minute interview with PG in 2005.
"I believe, and Y Combinator is kind of an experiment to test this, that programmers can become business types. I think that business is kind of like chess in the sense that the hard part is not knowing the rules about how the pieces move. The hard part is actually being able to look ahead and make strategies. The hard part about playing chess is being smart. Business is like that. There's a few rules of business and that hackers are capable of learning them, most hackers. Once they learn them, they'll be as good at it as business guys. Hackers can be business guys."
--Paul Graham, Unedited Interview from 2005 during YC's first Summer Founders Program.