I feel this way as well--except I think I'm what he calls a "hacker", and as someone mentions above, I only like making money--so far in my professional career, anyway--because it represents freedom to work on stuff I care about, in some sense. Usually people call this "time"; if you have the money to keep yourself alive without working constantly on things you don't care about, then you have time for things you care about. I think of it as something more like "energy" myself, since even when I don't have a paying job at all (and thus have lots and lots of time), I still can only stand working in a few fairly short, intense bursts per day, due to the rise and fall of my inspiration and fatigue and so forth.

But back onto Mr. Graham: Since I'm a "hacker", I already know a lot of stuff he knows about software development, and in fact it's clear that I also know a lot that he doesn't address in his essays and probably isn't even aware of. I mean, I'm a video game developer who writes in Java on Windows machines, and I've got good reason to be such. Why should I pay attention to Mr. Lisp here who scorns Windows and has never used Java, and who doesn't even mention playing games, let alone programming them?* I'm sure I could learn some things from him, but he is ignorant of my world, however much he may know about his own kind of software development.

He is far from ignorant, however, about startups. And he's got interesting things to say about various other, non-technical subjects too. So let him talk about those!

* I suspect there are plenty of Mac fans and Lisp fans and C++ fans among this site's readers who could snappily answer this question. I do not have time to armor this comment against techie criticism; that would itself require an essay. Suffice to say that I claim I could if I wanted to. :)