“I have tremendous respect for Paul Graham. His essays– repackaged in the book Hackers and Painters– are among the best writing I’ve found on software engineering. Not all of them are so great, of course, but the majority are well worth your time. That’s more than I can say for 99.9-infinitely-repeating-percent of the content on the web. He’s certainly a better and more authoritative writer than I.

But lately I’ve begun to wonder whether Mr. Graham, like Joel Spolsky before him, has devolved into self-absorption and irrelevance. Consider his latest essay, You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss, which opens with this distasteful anecdote…”

“I’ve been thinking about a number of new product ideas lately. In doing so, I’ve been trying to come up with a way more structured way of evaluating them. Here’s a first attempt at defining that. It’s not as clear as I’d like it to be. But perhaps you’ll find it useful.”

“I’m not claiming of course that every startup has to go to Silicon Valley to succeed. Just that all other things being equal, the more of a startup hub a place is, the better startups will do there. But other considerations can outweigh the advantages of moving. I’m not saying founders with families should uproot them to move halfway around the world; that might be too much of a distraction.”

“The road to success is hard. We all know this, but still hope for the quick success of a Twitter instead of the starting and stopping of a flickr (started as a game). ImThere is a startup that started and stopped, and David Gorman documents their eventual success.”

“Just about every journalist I’ve talked to recently asks about the growth at 37signals. ‘You’re still just 8 people, how do you plan on growing?’ ‘When will you begin to really grow the company?’ ‘Why have you decided not to grow the company?’

The answer is always the same: We are growing, but not physically. You can grow without ‘growing.’ In fact, I think it’s a healthier path.”

“I would describe myself as someone who goes to a lot of events, someone that participates in a lot of group (tech and non tech). Some events are amazing, some forgettable and some just rock you to the core. Startup Weekend Toronto was one of the latter, and not for all the good reasons.

Some of you, even my close friends, didn’t know about the weekend. Shortly after arriving, some major red flags were raised, and if you didn’t follow my twitter, you didn’t hear about them until now (when things go bad, you want to learn as much as you can without broadcasting to the world why you are learning so much!). I would like to document what went on, what went really well and what didn’t. At the end of the weekend I was extremely disappointed, but equally happy. The core of my biggest fears came roaring to the forefront, seemingly trying to kill this idea that I am extremely passionate about. I learned more in the first three hours of Startup Weekend Toronto than I did in a month and a half planning and organizing for Startup Weekends around the globe.”

“A startup’s initial business plan doesn’t matter that much, because it is very hard to determine up front exactly what combination of product and market will result in success.

By definition you will be doing something new, in a world that is a very uncertain place. You are simply probably not going to know whether your initial idea will work as a product and a business, or not. And you will probably have to rapidly evolve your plan — possibly every aspect of it — as you go.’

“I work in the surreal world of Silicon Valley where venture capitalists fund companies based on PowerPoint pitches and executive summaries. My friend Tim Berry rightfully pointed that business plans still serve an important role in ‘the rest of the world.’”

“A common question on the Business of Software forum is ‘How do I get started…’ — fill in the blank. Some people are seeking their first consulting clients, some their first product customers, and some are seeking people interested in their service; others are trying to grow their business. Whatever the situation, we all want to get the word out about our products or services and we’d like it to then spread like crazy. Whatever you think of ‘marketing’ or ’sales’, spreading the word is really all it’s about. For most BOS readers, it’s not about advertising, large marketing campaigns, or a giant sales force. It’s about something else that I think can be summarized in these seven steps.”

“Ever since I came back to HOTorNOT in October 2006, people have been asking me what the company is up to. For the previous 6 years, HOTorNOT had pretty much been steady along the same course: A picture rating site with a dating-like application built on top (without the seriousness of a dating site) that generated healthy amounts of cash for my cofounder Jim and I. For the first 3.5 years, it was Jim and I working about 10 hours a week each, with the company earning many millions of dollars per year.

Then 2 things changed, and we realized we had to change with them…”

“This post officially announces that my side project (originally named cause & effect and later named certitude) is over. For those of you who weren’t subjected to one of my enthusiastic rants, here was my Graham Question: Can we predict the outcome of a software development project with objective observation? …So I set out to write a piece of software that, pure and simple, would look at a software development project and show you a traffic light: a green light would mean that the project looks like it’s on track, a yellow light would mean that the project needed help, and a red light would mean that there is no hope… So how and why did I fail?”

“I was recently ‘let go’ from my job of three years for violating my employee agreement for allegedy working on a side business and not properly disclosing this to my employer. In addition, I’m now fighting my employer’s claim that because I did some writing on my blog during work hours, my startup’s IP is their property.”

“1. Million Dollar Homepage: 1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel – that’s perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire.”

“A short guide to what works and what doesn’t when talking to reporters.”

“fortuitous is written by Matthew Haughey (wikipedia) and was created in spring of 2007, after an epiphany at SXSW… I’m a hobbyist turned designer turned developer who eventually got to quit my day job and support myself with my projects. Along the way, my business life has gotten increasingly complicated and I’ve had to spend hours researching accounting, the law, and usage patterns on my sites. I intend to post a new essay about some aspect of my experiences every Monday.”