He wrote two influential Lisp books, invented Bayesian spam filtering, did Arc, wrote essays (where the doing == the telling) and he had the Yahoo exit.
Then he started YC.
This doesn't disprove your primary point (that fame can precede the 'doing'), but I'd say that pg shouldn't be on the above list. You make a good point about 37signals, though. And I'll add Steve Yegge to that list too (Amazon -> Google)
Fair enough, though it depends a bit how you define achievement. Writing is in my opinion excluded almost by definition in this debate, otherwise the question of "what have Curtis / Gruber achieved?" is a bit moot. ARC is great, I'm sure, but not changing the world (yet). Bayesian filtering is a biggie, granted.
By the way, I don't mean to imply any criticism of people doing things in that order. On the contrary, a mismatch between fame through writing and "doing" seems like a good sign that you should buy a stake in that person, if that were possible.
I originally wrote 'popularized Bayesian spam filtering', but thought it wasn't strong enough. (What do you call 'made Bayesian spam filtering good enough, and then published an influential essay that caused the adoption and further improvement of the technique'?)
Thanks for the link - didn't find that in my cursory Google search.
Then he started YC.
This doesn't disprove your primary point (that fame can precede the 'doing'), but I'd say that pg shouldn't be on the above list. You make a good point about 37signals, though. And I'll add Steve Yegge to that list too (Amazon -> Google)