OK, I'll just post what Valleywag excerpted, with the assumption that if any context is left out, it is in favor of the Valleywag author, with interjections of how I interpreted PG's words:

> I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. [...]

OK, nothing bad here, assuming that the implication is that there aren't many female founders for him to discriminate against.

> The problem with that is I think, at least with technology companies, the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology. In fact, I've heard startups say that they did not like to hire people who had only started programming when they became CS majors in college.

No argument here.

> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13.

OK, so this is the statement that reeks of privilege. And I agree, except if you don't consider what immediately follows:

> What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now. It's already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers. I would have to stop and think about that.

So my interpretation of this was that PG implicitly acknowledges that boys have a privilege here, a privilege to explore computing at the formative age necessary to become a great hacker. For whatever reason, girls do not have that privilege in today's current society, and so PG proposes, as an example measure, to overhaul middle school curriculum.

OK, so PG didn't have any great revolutionary ideas on how to fix the problem of privilege, but it doesn't seem that was his expectation for the interview. What he said wasn't full of hope and sunshine too: for women who are at the entrepreneurial age right now, they've missed the optimal time to become a Steve Wozniak or Mark Zuckerberg. OK, that should raise objections of ageism, but it's not sexism, it's a statement of the shitty situation that girls have when it comes to exploring tech at a young age.

And what PG says is of course biased towards the importance of technical prowess, and frankly, I agree. Would Steve Jobs be anywhere if Woz wasn't the batshit-amazing young engineer that he was? Not at all. And so when PG says the problem of few female founders cannot be solved by just encouraging women to create startups -- without the necessary tech acumen...I think what he argues is reasonable from a technical standpoint. In terms of tech startups, it's not just ideas, but technical execution, and Apple is the very best example of that.

So I think PG is right to point out that "encourage more female-led startups" is more of a feel-good band-aid than a solution. We want more female-led startups and we want them to succeed. In PG's opinion, that kind of success -- which is a major longshot for men -- can only come from expanding the early opportunities for girls to get more interested in tech and science.