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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | What I Worked On
February 2021
Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming. I didn't write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are: short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | As well as HN, I wrote all of YC's internal software in Arc. But while I continued to work a good deal in Arc, I gradually stopped working on Arc, partly because I didn't have time to, and partly because it was a lot less attractive to mess around with the language now that we had all this infrastructure depending on i... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I was puzzled by the 1401. I couldn't figure out what to do with it. And in retrospect there's not much I could have done with it. The only form of input to programs was data stored on punched cards, and I didn't have any data stored on punched cards. The only other option was to do things that didn't rely on any input... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | With microcomputers, everything changed. Now you could have a computer sitting right in front of you, on a desk, that could respond to your keystrokes as it was running instead of just churning through a stack of punch cards and then stopping. [1]
The first of my friends to get a microcomputer built it himself. It w... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one, a TRS-80, in about 1980. The gold standard then was the Apple II, but a TRS-80 was good enough. This was when I really started programming. I wrote simple games, a program to predict how high my model rockets... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Though I liked programming, I didn't plan to study it in college. In college I was going to study philosophy, which sounded much more powerful. It seemed, to my naive high school self, to be the study of the ultimate truths, compared to which the things studied in other fields would be mere domain knowledge. What I dis... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | AI was in the air in the mid 1980s, but there were two things especially that made me want to work on it: a novel by Heinlein called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which featured an intelligent computer called Mike, and a PBS documentary that showed Terry Winograd using SHRDLU. I haven't tried rereading The Moon is a Ha... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | There weren't any classes in AI at Cornell then, not even graduate classes, so I started trying to teach myself. Which meant learning Lisp, since in those days Lisp was regarded as the language of AI. The commonly used programming languages then were pretty primitive, and programmers' ideas correspondingly so. The defa... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | For my undergraduate thesis, I reverse-engineered SHRDLU. My God did I love working on that program. It was a pleasing bit of code, but what made it even more exciting was my belief — hard to imagine now, but not unique in 1985 — that it was already climbing the lower slopes of intelligence.
I had gotten into a prog... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I applied to 3 grad schools: MIT and Yale, which were renowned for AI at the time, and Harvard, which I'd visited because Rich Draves went there, and was also home to Bill Woods, who'd invented the type of parser I used in my SHRDLU clone. Only Harvard accepted me, so that was where I went.
I don't remember the mome... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | What these programs really showed was that there's a subset of natural language that's a formal language. But a very proper subset. It was clear that there was an unbridgeable gap between what they could do and actually understanding natural language. It was not, in fact, simply a matter of teaching SHRDLU more words. ... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | So I looked around to see what I could salvage from the wreckage of my plans, and there was Lisp. I knew from experience that Lisp was interesting for its own sake and not just for its association with AI, even though that was the main reason people cared about it at the time. So I decided to focus on Lisp. In fact, I ... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | The problem with systems work, though, was that it didn't last. Any program you wrote today, no matter how good, would be obsolete in a couple decades at best. People might mention your software in footnotes, but no one would actually use it. And indeed, it would seem very feeble work. Only people with a sense of the h... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | In this dissatisfied state I went in 1988 to visit Rich Draves at CMU, where he was in grad school. One day I went to visit the Carnegie Institute, where I'd spent a lot of time as a kid. While looking at a painting there I realized something that might seem obvious, but was a big surprise to me. There, right on the wa... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I had always liked looking at paintings. Could I make them? I had no idea. I'd never imagined it was even possible. I knew intellectually that people made art — that it didn't just appear spontaneously — but it was as if the people who made it were a different species. They either lived long ago or were mysterious geni... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I didn't see a way out of this situation. I didn't want to drop out of grad school, but how else was I going to get out? I remember when my friend Robert Morris got kicked out of Cornell for writing the internet worm of 1988, I was envious that he'd found such a spectacular way to get out of grad school.
Then one da... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I picked applications of continuations as the topic. In retrospect I should have written about macros and embedded languages. There's a whole world there that's barely been explored. But all I wanted was to get out of grad school, and my rapidly written dissertation sufficed, just barely.
Meanwhile I was applying to... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Toward the end of the summer I got a big surprise: a letter from the Accademia, which had been delayed because they'd sent it to Cambridge England instead of Cambridge Massachusetts, inviting me to take the entrance exam in Florence that fall. This was now only weeks away. My nice landlady let me leave my stuff in her ... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Only stranieri (foreigners) had to take this entrance exam. In retrospect it may well have been a way of excluding them, because there were so many stranieri attracted by the idea of studying art in Florence that the Italian students would otherwise have been outnumbered. I was in decent shape at painting and drawing f... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I'm only up to age 25 and already there are such conspicuous patterns. Here I was, yet again about to attend some august institution in the hopes of learning about some prestigious subject, and yet again about to be disappointed. The students and faculty in the painting department at the Accademia were the nicest peopl... |
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} | Our model turned out to live just down the street from me. She made a living from a combination of modelling and making fakes for a local antique dealer. She'd copy an obscure old painting out of a book, and then he'd take the copy and maltreat it to make it look old. [3]
While I was a student at the Accademia I sta... |
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} | an obscure old painting out of a book, and then he'd take the copy and maltreat it to make it look old. [3] |
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} | While I was a student at the Accademia I started painting still lives in my bedroom at night. These paintings were tiny, because the room was, and because I painted them on leftover scraps of canvas, which was all I could afford at the time. Painting still lives is different from painting people, because the subject, a... |
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} | I liked painting still lives because I was curious about what I was seeing. In everyday life, we aren't consciously aware of much we're seeing. Most visual perception is handled by low-level processes that merely tell your brain "that's a water droplet" without telling you details like where the lightest and darkest po... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Our teacher, professor Ulivi, was a nice guy. He could see I worked hard, and gave me a good grade, which he wrote down in a sort of passport each student had. But the Accademia wasn't teaching me anything except Italian, and my money was running out, so at the end of the first year I went back to the US.
I wanted t... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Interleaf had done something pretty bold. Inspired by Emacs, they'd added a scripting language, and even made the scripting language a dialect of Lisp. Now they wanted a Lisp hacker to write things in it. This was the closest thing I've had to a normal job, and I hereby apologize to my boss and coworkers, because I was... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | The language we used was an early version of Fortran. You had to type programs on punch cards, then stack them in the card reader and press a button to load the program into memory and run it. The result would ordinarily be to print something on the spectacularly loud printer. |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I learned some useful things at Interleaf, though they were mostly about what not to do. I learned that it's better for technology companies to be run by product people than sales people (though sales is a real skill and people who are good at it are really good at it), that it leads to bugs when code is edited by too ... |
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} | But the most important thing I learned, and which I used in both Viaweb and Y Combinator, is that the low end eats the high end: that it's good to be the "entry level" option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you're not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling. Which in turn m... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | In the fall of 1992 I moved back to Providence to continue at RISD. The foundation had merely been intro stuff, and the Accademia had been a (very civilized) joke. Now I was going to see what real art school was like. But alas it was more like the Accademia than not. Better organized, certainly, and a lot more expensiv... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | A signature style is the visual equivalent of what in show business is known as a "schtick": something that immediately identifies the work as yours and no one else's. For example, when you see a painting that looks like a certain kind of cartoon, you know it's by Roy Lichtenstein. So if you see a big painting of this ... |
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0.03128759562969208... | {
"author": "Paul Graham"
} | There were plenty of earnest students too: kids who "could draw" in high school, and now had come to what was supposed to be the best art school in the country, to learn to draw even better. They tended to be confused and demoralized by what they found at RISD, but they kept going, because painting was what they did. I... |
32 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Asterix comics begin by zooming in on a tiny corner of Roman Gaul that turns out not to be controlled by the Romans. You can do something similar on a map of New York City: if you zoom in on the Upper East Side, there's a tiny corner that's not rich, or at least wasn't in 1993. It's called Yorkville, and that was my ne... |
33 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I was nervous about money, because I could sense that Interleaf was on the way down. Freelance Lisp hacking work was very rare, and I didn't want to have to program in another language, which in those days would have meant C++ if I was lucky. So with my unerring nose for financial opportunity, I decided to write anothe... |
34 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | She liked to paint on big, square canvases, 4 to 5 feet on a side. One day in late 1994 as I was stretching one of these monsters there was something on the radio about a famous fund manager. He wasn't that much older than me, and was super rich. The thought suddenly occurred to me: why don't I become rich? Then I'll b... |
35 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | If I wanted to get rich, here was the next train leaving the station. I was right about that part. What I got wrong was the idea. I decided we should start a company to put art galleries online. I can't honestly say, after reading so many Y Combinator applications, that this was the worst startup idea ever, but it was ... |
36 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Then some online stores started to appear, and I realized that except for the order buttons they were identical to the sites we'd been generating for galleries. This impressive-sounding thing called an "internet storefront" was something we already knew how to build.
So in the summer of 1995, after I submitted the c... |
37 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | We were working out of Robert's apartment in Cambridge. His roommate was away for big chunks of time, during which I got to sleep in his room. For some reason there was no bed frame or sheets, just a mattress on the floor. One morning as I was lying on this mattress I had an idea that made me sit up like a capital L. W... |
38 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | This kind of software, known as a web app, is common now, but at the time it wasn't clear that it was even possible. To find out, we decided to try making a version of our store builder that you could control through the browser. A couple days later, on August 12, we had one that worked. The UI was horrible, but it pro... |
39 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | We started a new company we called Viaweb, after the fact that our software worked via the web, and we got $10,000 in seed funding from Idelle's husband Julian. In return for that and doing the initial legal work and giving us business advice, we gave him 10% of the company. Ten years later this deal became the model f... |
40 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | We originally hoped to launch in September, but we got more ambitious about the software as we worked on it. Eventually we managed to build a WYSIWYG site builder, in the sense that as you were creating pages, they looked exactly like the static ones that would be generated later, except that instead of leading to stat... |
41 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | In September, Robert rebelled. "We've been working on this for a month," he said, "and it's still not done." This is funny in retrospect, because he would still be working on it almost 3 years later. But I decided it might be prudent to recruit more programmers, and I asked Robert who else in grad school with him was r... |
42 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | In September, Robert rebelled. "We've been working on this for a month," he said, "and it's still not done." This is funny in retrospect, because he would still be working on it almost 3 years later. But I decided it might be prudent to recruit more programmers, and I asked Robert who else in grad school with him was r... |
43 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | We opened for business, with 6 stores, in January 1996. It was just as well we waited a few months, because although we worried we were late, we were actually almost fatally early. There was a lot of talk in the press then about ecommerce, but not many people actually wanted online stores. [8]
There were three main ... |
44 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | There were a lot of startups making ecommerce software in the second half of the 90s. We were determined to be the Microsoft Word, not the Interleaf. Which meant being easy to use and inexpensive. It was lucky for us that we were poor, because that caused us to make Viaweb even more inexpensive than we realized. We cha... |
45 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | We did a lot of things right by accident like that. For example, we did what's now called "doing things that don't scale," although at the time we would have described it as "being so lame that we're driven to the most desperate measures to get users." The most common of which was building stores for them. This seemed ... |
46 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Though this felt wrong, it was exactly the right thing to be doing. Building stores for users taught us about retail, and about how it felt to use our software. I was initially both mystified and repelled by "business" and thought we needed a "business person" to be in charge of it, but once we started to get users, I ... |
47 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Another thing I didn't get at the time is that growth rate is the ultimate test of a startup. Our growth rate was fine. We had about 70 stores at the end of 1996 and about 500 at the end of 1997. I mistakenly thought the thing that mattered was the absolute number of users. And that is the thing that matters in the sen... |
48 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Alas I hired lots more people, partly because our investors wanted me to, and partly because that's what startups did during the Internet Bubble. A company with just a handful of employees would have seemed amateurish. So we didn't reach breakeven until about when Yahoo bought us in the summer of 1998. Which in turn me... |
49 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | It was a huge relief when Yahoo bought us. In principle our Viaweb stock was valuable. It was a share in a business that was profitable and growing rapidly. But it didn't feel very valuable to me; I had no idea how to value a business, but I was all too keenly aware of the near-death experiences we seemed to have every... |
50 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | The next year, from the summer of 1998 to the summer of 1999, must have been the least productive of my life. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was worn out from the effort and stress of running Viaweb. For a while after I got to California I tried to continue my usual m.o. of programming till 3 in the morning, bu... |
51 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Yahoo had given us a lot of options when they bought us. At the time I thought Yahoo was so overvalued that they'd never be worth anything, but to my astonishment the stock went up 5x in the next year. I hung on till the first chunk of options vested, then in the summer of 1999 I left. It had been so long since I'd pai... |
52 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | When I said I was leaving, my boss at Yahoo had a long conversation with me about my plans. I told him all about the kinds of pictures I wanted to paint. At the time I was touched that he took such an interest in me. Now I realize it was because he thought I was lying. My options at that point were worth about $2 milli... |
53 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | But I really was quitting to paint, and I started immediately. There was no time to lose. I'd already burned 4 years getting rich. Now when I talk to founders who are leaving after selling their companies, my advice is always the same: take a vacation. That's what I should have done, just gone off somewhere and done no... |
54 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | When I got back to New York I resumed my old life, except now I was rich. It was as weird as it sounds. I resumed all my old patterns, except now there were doors where there hadn't been. Now when I was tired of walking, all I had to do was raise my hand, and (unless it was raining) a taxi would stop to pick me up. Now... |
55 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Meanwhile I looked for an apartment to buy. Now I could actually choose what neighborhood to live in. Where, I asked myself and various real estate agents, is the Cambridge of New York? Aided by occasional visits to actual Cambridge, I gradually realized there wasn't one. Huh.
Around this time, in the spring of 2000... |
56 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I got so excited about this idea that I couldn't think about anything else. It seemed obvious that this was the future. I didn't particularly want to start another company, but it was clear that this idea would have to be embodied as one, so I decided to move to Cambridge and start it. I hoped to lure Robert into worki... |
57 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Hmph. Well, I'd do it myself then. I recruited Dan Giffin, who had worked for Viaweb, and two undergrads who wanted summer jobs, and we got to work trying to build what it's now clear is about twenty companies and several open source projects worth of software. The language for defining applications would of course be ... |
58 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I started working on the application builder, Dan worked on network infrastructure, and the two undergrads worked on the first two services (images and phone calls). But about halfway through the summer I realized I really didn't want to run a company — especially not a big one, which it was looking like this would hav... |
59 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | The subset I would build as an open source project was the new Lisp, whose parentheses I now wouldn't even have to hide. A lot of Lisp hackers dream of building a new Lisp, partly because one of the distinctive features of the language is that it has dialects, and partly, I think, because we have in our minds a Platoni... |
60 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Wow, I thought, there's an audience. If I write something and put it on the web, anyone can read it. That may seem obvious now, but it was surprising then. In the print era there was a narrow channel to readers, guarded by fierce monsters known as editors. The only way to get an audience for anything you wrote was to g... |
61 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | In the print era, the channel for publishing essays had been vanishingly small. Except for a few officially anointed thinkers who went to the right parties in New York, the only people allowed to publish essays were specialists writing about their specialties. There were so many essays that had never been written, beca... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | One of the most conspicuous patterns I've noticed in my life is how well it has worked, for me at least, to work on things that weren't prestigious. Still life has always been the least prestigious form of painting. Viaweb and Y Combinator both seemed lame
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but to the extent there was a... |
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... | {
"author": "Paul Graham"
} | One of the most conspicuous patterns I've noticed in my life is how well it has worked, for me at least, to work on things that weren't prestigious. Still life has always been the least prestigious form of painting. Viaweb and Y Combinator both seemed lame when we started them. I still get the glassy eye from strangers... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | It's not that unprestigious types of work are good per se. But when you find yourself drawn to some kind of work despite its current lack of prestige, it's a sign both that there's something real to be discovered there, and that you have the right kind of motives. Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious. If a... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Over the next several years I wrote lots of essays about all kinds of different topics. O'Reilly reprinted a collection of them as a book, called Hackers & Painters after one of the essays in it. I also worked on spam filters, and did some more painting. I used to have dinners for a group of friends every thursday nigh... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Jessica was in charge of marketing at a Boston investment bank. This bank thought it understood startups, but over the next year, as she met friends of mine from the startup world, she was surprised how different reality was. And how colorful their stories were. So she decided to compile a book of interviews with start... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | One of my tricks for writing essays had always been to give talks. The prospect of having to stand up in front of a group of people and tell them something that won't waste their time is a great spur to the imagination. When the Harvard Computer Society, the undergrad computer club, asked me to give a talk, I decided I... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | So I gave this talk, in the course of which I told them that the best sources of seed funding were successful startup founders, because then they'd be sources of advice too. Whereupon it seemed they were all looking expectantly at me. Horrified at the prospect of having my inbox flooded by business plans (if I'd only k... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | As Jessica and I were walking home from dinner on March 11, at the corner of Garden and Walker streets, these three threads converged. Screw the VCs who were taking so long to make up their minds. We'd start our own investment firm and actually implement the ideas we'd been talking about. I'd fund it, and Jessica could... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | There are multiple components to Y Combinator, and we didn't figure them all out at once. The part we got first was to be an angel firm. In those days, those two words didn't go together. There were VC firms, which were organized companies with people whose job it was to make investments, but they only did big, million... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | YC was not organized as a fund. It was cheap enough to run that we funded it with our own money. That went right by 99% of readers, but professional investors are thinking "Wow, that means they got all the returns." But once again, this was not due to any particular insight on our part. We didn't know how VC firms were... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | The most distinctive thing about YC is the batch model: to fund a bunch of startups all at once, twice a year, and then to spend three months focusing intensively on trying to help them. That part we discovered by accident, not merely implicitly but explicitly due to our ignorance about investing. We needed to get expe... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | We'd use the building I owned in Cambridge as our headquarters. We'd all have dinner there once a week — on tuesdays, since I was already cooking for the thursday diners on thursdays — and after dinner we'd bring in experts on startups to give talks.
We knew undergrads were deciding then about summer jobs, so in a m... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | We invited about 20 of the 225 groups to interview in person, and from those we picked 8 to fund. They were an impressive group. That first batch included reddit, Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, who went on to found Twitch, Aaron Swartz, who had already helped write the RSS spec and would a few years later become a martyr... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | The deal for startups was based on a combination of the deal we did with Julian ($10k for 10%) and what Robert said MIT grad students got for the summer ($6k). We invested $6k per founder, which in the typical two-founder case was $12k, in return for 6%. That had to be fair, because it was twice as good as the deal we ... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | As YC grew, we started to notice other advantages of scale. The alumni became a tight community, dedicated to helping one another, and especially the current batch, whose shoes they remembered being in. We also noticed that the startups were becoming one another's customers. We used to refer jokingly to the "YC GDP," b... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | In the summer of 2006, Robert and I started working on a new version of Arc. This one was reasonably fast, because it was compiled into Scheme. To test this new Arc, I wrote Hacker News in it. It was originally meant to be a news aggregator for startup founders and was called Startup News, but after a few months I got ... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | HN was no doubt good for YC, but it was also by far the biggest source of stress for me. If all I'd had to do was select and help founders, life would have been so easy. And that implies that HN was a mistake. Surely the biggest source of stress in one's work should at least be something close to the core of the work. ... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Daniel Gackle, Ralph Hazell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this. |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | There were parts of the job I didn't like. Disputes between cofounders, figuring out when people were lying to us, fighting with people who maltreated the startups, and so on. But I worked hard even at the parts I didn't like. I was haunted by something Kevin Hale once said about companies: "No one works harder than th... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | One day in 2010, when he was visiting California for interviews, Robert Morris did something astonishing: he offered me unsolicited advice. I can only remember him doing that once before. One day at Viaweb, when I was bent over double from a kidney stone, he suggested that it would be a good idea for him to take me to ... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | At the time I didn't understand what he meant, but gradually it dawned on me that he was saying I should quit. This seemed strange advice, because YC was doing great. But if there was one thing rarer than Rtm offering advice, it was Rtm being wrong. So this set me thinking. It was true that on my current trajectory, YC... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | In the summer of 2012 my mother had a stroke, and the cause turned out to be a blood clot caused by colon cancer. The stroke destroyed her balance, and she was put in a nursing home, but she really wanted to get out of it and back to her house, and my sister and I were determined to help her do it. I used to fly up to ... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | When we asked Sam if he wanted to be president of YC, initially he said
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up to Oregon to visit her regularly, and I had a lot of time to think on those flights. On one of them I realized I was ready to hand YC over to someone else.
I asked Jessica if she wanted to be president, but s... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | When we asked Sam if he wanted to be president of YC, initially he said no. He wanted to start a startup to make nuclear reactors. But I kept at it, and in October 2013 he finally agreed. We decided he'd take over starting with the winter 2014 batch. For the rest of 2013 I left running YC more and more to Sam, partly s... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | What should I do next? Rtm's advice hadn't included anything about that. I wanted to do something completely different, so I decided I'd paint. I wanted to see how good I could get if I really focused on it. So the day after I stopped working on YC, I started painting. I was rusty and it took a while to get back into s... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I realize that sounds rather wimpy. But attention is a zero sum game. If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project that's not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then it's getting in the way of another project that is. And at 50 there was some opportunity cost to screwing around.
I started ... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | The distinctive thing about Lisp is that its core is a language defined by writing an interpreter in itself. It wasn't originally intended as a programming language in the ordinary sense. It was meant to be a formal model of computation, an alternative to the Turing machine. If you want to write an interpreter for a la... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | McCarthy's 1960 Lisp did nothing more than interpret Lisp expressions. It was missing a lot of things you'd want in a programming language. So these had to be added, and when they were, they weren't defined using McCarthy's original axiomatic approach. That wouldn't have been feasible at the time. McCarthy tested his i... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Now they are, though. Now you could continue using McCarthy's axiomatic approach till you'd defined a complete programming language. And as long as every change you made to McCarthy's Lisp was a discoveredness-preserving transformation, you could, in principle, end up with a complete language that had this quality. Har... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | I had to ban myself from writing essays during most of this time, or I'd never have finished. In late 2015 I spent 3 months writing essays, and when I went back to working on Bel I could barely understand the code. Not so much because it was badly written as because the problem is so convoluted. When you're working on ... |
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there. I remember taking the boys to the coast on a sunny day in 2015 and figuring out how to deal with some problem involving continuations while I watched them ... |
93 | [
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"author": "Paul Graham"
} | In the fall of 2019, Bel was finally finished. Like McCarthy's original Lisp, it's a spec rather than an implementation, although like McCarthy's Lisp it's a spec expressed as code.
Now that I could write essays again, I wrote a bunch about topics I'd had stacked up. I kept writing essays through 2020, but I also st... |
94 | [
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0... | {
"author": "Paul Graham"
} | [1] My experience skipped a step in the evolution of computers: time-sharing machines with interactive OSes. I went straight from batch processing to microcomputers, which made microcomputers seem all the more exciting.
[2] Italian words for abstract concepts can nearly always be predicted from their English cognate... |
95 | [
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... | {
"author": "Paul Graham"
} | [4] You can of course paint people like still lives if you want to, and they're willing. That sort of portrait is arguably the apex of still life painting, though the long sitting does tend to produce pained expressions in the sitters.
[5] Interleaf was one of many companies that had smart people and built impressiv... |
96 | [
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... | {
"author": "Paul Graham"
} | [8] Most software you can launch as soon as it's done. But when the software is an online store builder and you're hosting the stores, if you don't have any users yet, that fact will be painfully obvious. So before we could launch publicly we had to launch privately, in the sense of recruiting an initial set of users a... |
97 | [
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-0.0043756184168159... | {
"author": "Paul Graham"
} | [10] This was the first instance of what is now a familiar experience, and so was what happened next, when I read the comments and found they were full of angry people. How could I claim that Lisp was better than other languages? Weren't they all Turing complete? People who see the responses to essays I write sometimes... |
98 | [
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... | {
"author": "Paul Graham"
} | [12] There is a general lesson here that our experience with Y Combinator also teaches: Customs continue to constrain you long after the restrictions that caused them have disappeared. Customary VC practice had once, like the customs about publishing essays, been based on real constraints. Startups had once been much m... |
99 | [
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... | {
"author": "Paul Graham"
} | [13] Y Combinator was not the original name. At first we were called Cambridge Seed. But we didn't want a regional name, in case someone copied us in Silicon Valley, so we renamed ourselves after one of the coolest tricks in the lambda calculus, the Y combinator.
I picked orange as our color partly because it's the ... |
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