And really is Viaweb that big of a deal? He got rich by selling .com in the .com... | Hacker News

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lanstin on June 29, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: How to Work Hard

And really is Viaweb that big of a deal? He got rich by selling .com in the .com bubble to another .com company. That wasn't so hard at the time. He wrote a good book on Lisp, and used his riches to invest and get richer. None of this seems particularly extraordinary. Does he somehow imagine Dropbox or Viaweb have transformed human experience? He writes a good essay, but he seems overly impressed by his own success.

cma on June 30, 2021 [–]

He has had many successes. He essentially was the first to solve the commercial email spam problem:

http://paulgraham.com/spam.html

If you remember email before and after those techniques were implemented into mail clients of the time, it was night and day.

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