Paul Graham is the Malcom Gladwell of tech. He starts with an idea that people mostly agree with ("Middle managers are bad"), offers insights so vague as to be useless ("but sometimes you need managers"), all in service of a story he wants to tell.
Gladwell is mostly guilty of embellishing details to tell a good story, but Graham is always pushing an agenda. Sometimes it's about money. Sometimes it's about his ego.
His agenda constrains his essays to "airport book" level writing.