People started knowing about Paul Graham (pg) in the early-mid 2000s via his essays - <a href="http://paulgraham.com/articles.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/articles.html</a>.<p>Most people found them and discussed them on Slashdot, I think - certainly I first read How to Start a Startup (<a href="http://paulgraham.com/start.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/start.html</a>) after my friend/co-founder found it on Slashdot.<p>A few months after How to Start a Startup was published, the first batch of Y Combinator was convened - <a href="http://paulgraham.com/sfp.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/sfp.html</a><p>It went so well that they ran it again that winter, then kept running it twice a year.<p>One of the startups in that first batch was Reddit.<p>There's some story about pg wanting the Reddit founders to make a subreddit for talking about startups/tech to be a community for people interested in YC, but for some reason it didn't happen the way he wanted so he decided to build his own forum, initially called Startup News (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html</a>), then soon after became Hacker News - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html</a>.<p>The objective of Startup News/Hacker News was twofold - as real-world use-case for the Arc programming language he was creating, and to be a place where people interested in startups/tech could come to read interesting articles and discuss interesting topics, and then maybe eventually become interested enough in startups to apply to Y Combinator.<p>Some more detail here:<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-news/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne...</a>
Startup news link submission site <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=124</a>
Reddit, I think.<p>There was a /startups or similar channel on reddit, one of the first YC companies, and they managed to attract people over here.