Billionaires don’t take kindly to people who bash on their T.V. shows as one Silicon Valley investor learned after suggesting that the iconic show “Shark Tank” was a waste of time for entrepreneurs.
Paul Graham is one of Silicon Valley’s defining venture capitalists and co-founder of Y Combinator, the elite startup accelerator program with a low acceptance rate that birthed startups like Airbnb and Dropbox.
Graham also firmly believes in success through building great products as opposed to success through great marketing — something that he rather dislikes about the show “Shark Tank”. He made that known with his tweet this week:
However billionaire investor Chris Sacca, an early investor in Uber and Twitter who served as a guest judge on the show, and Mark Cuban, a regular judge on the show and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, quickly fired back at Graham with the alleged entitled elitism that Y Combinator promotes:
Graham eventually responded to Sacca with:
Both may have good points — you do need a great product, but no product, however ingenious, can make it in a competitive world without good marketing and possibly the most important factor of all — luck.
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