It's clear to me from pg's latest essays is that he is no longer living in the future. There's a generational divide that's growing between younger founders and how they see technology with the first golden generation of tech - the Apple, Microsoft, Web 1.0/2.0 type of inventors and business people. Because there is no way you can show this essay to a younger founder and not have it feel out of touch.
There's a selection bias there: people who think YC or YC's startup model is out-of-touch don't apply to YC, and certainly don't get selected.
Personally, I've watched YC grow from something that I thought was an obviously good idea but nobody else agreed with me about (I applied to the first SFP in 2005, as a college student), to something mainstream that lots of people aspired to (~2010), to being something at best ho-hum and at worst actively bad for the world (today). Getting rich is just not desirable anymore; technology is only desirable insofar as it helps solve pressing problems for the world as a whole.
In 2010 I was the one who would go to parties and young people would be like "Oh, you work for Google, that's so cool!". In 2014, it was "Oh, you're founding a startup to fix unemployment, that's so cool!". Now when my wife (who works as a professional impact investor) goes to a party with young people, it's "Oh, you're solving climate change and funding reproductive healthcare and working for racial justice, that's so cool!" Meanwhile, I say "I work in software" neutrally and omit that it's for Google.
That's a point about the general population, not founders, who form a pretty different (and pretty small) subset.
The other thing I'd be cautious about here is that the curve you describe basically always happens. Shit was always cooler when it was newer and we were there before everyone else, etc.; people say this about everything. I'm not sure how to correct for this, but it's a strong skew.
But GP, despite using the word "cool", is not really talking about how "cool" in a light sense those occupations are perceived. They explicitly talk about how some activities today are "actively bad for the world" and perceived as such.
There is a moral judgment behind the "That's cool dude!" you get when you reveal you're working to fix the climate crisis and I suspect there is fear of moral judgment behind GP's omission of their employer, due to their employer's poor record on the moral issues of the day. This goes deeper than shit being less cool as time passes. In short we're not talking about dubstep or fidget spinners.
Moral judgments like this do not follow a curve that "always happens". It has always been good to volunteer at soup kitchens on one hand, and on the other hand while it used to be good to not be evil and "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", I'm sure you'd agree nowadays Google is not perceived as less cool than it was only because it's not the latest shiny new tech success.
Both your points are true. But for a startup to be successful, it needs to have customers, or at least users. The available market for a company is the dollar-weighted set of people who think that it's cool (or at least necessary). Young people caring a whole lot about climate change or racial justice speaks directly to what potential users are looking for, just like kids throwing sheep at each other and hitting the Like button spoke volumes about what startups would be hot in 2005.
I think your timeline illustrates another point: fashions are always changing.
And fashions also come into play in these judgments. I will eat my 8G-networked collapsible VR headset if, 20 years from now, people aren't horribly cringing at the popular 2020 notions of "solving climate change" and "working for racial justice".
Not because of whatever feelings I have towards those advocacies, but because even their currently-"cool" instantiation is largely driven by fashions.
> And fashions also come into play in these judgments. I will eat my 8G-networked collapsible VR headset if, 20 years from now, people aren't horribly cringing at the popular 2020 notions of "solving climate change" and "working for racial justice".
Are people today horribly cringing at the civil rights activists from the 50-60s or gay rights activists from the 80s-90s?
I think people are far more likely to cringe at naive optimism (e.g. postwar enthusiasm for heavy industry and its products) than genuine attempts to tackle problems.
