author stringclasses 11
values | title stringlengths 2 899 ⌀ | url stringlengths 18 120 | text stringlengths 9 1.26M | word_count int64 3 199k |
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Paul Graham | How to Do Great Work | http://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html | July 2023
If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.
Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the in... | 11,827 |
Paul Graham | Having Kids | http://paulgraham.com/kids.html | December 2019
Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children. But did I want them now? No.
If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since I was ... | 1,537 |
Paul Graham | How to Lose Time and Money | http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html | July 2010
When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years s... | 678 |
Paul Graham | The Brand Age | http://paulgraham.com/brandage.html | March 2026
In the early 1970s disaster struck the Swiss watch industry. Now people call it the quartz crisis, but in fact it was a compound of three separate disasters that all happened at about the same time.
The first was competition from Japan. The Swiss had been watching the Japanese in the rear view mirr... | 7,663 |
Paul Graham | The Shape of the Essay Field | http://paulgraham.com/field.html | June 2025
An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But there are three different reasons people might not know something, and they yield three very different kinds of essays.
One reason people won't know something is if it's not important to know. That doesn't mean it will make a bad ess... | 769 |
Paul Graham | Good Writing | http://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html | May 2025
There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about important things. It might seem as if these two kinds of good would be unrelated, like the speed of a car and the color it's pain... | 1,645 |
Paul Graham | What to Do | http://paulgraham.com/do.html | March 2025
What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it myself in the process of investigating something else. But once I did, I thought I should at least try to a... | 1,590 |
Paul Graham | The Origins of Wokeness | http://paulgraham.com/woke.html | January 2025
The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad:
> A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.
This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows t... | 6,168 |
Paul Graham | Writes and Write-Nots | http://paulgraham.com/writes.html | October 2024
I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.
One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have... | 555 |
Paul Graham | When To Do What You Love | http://paulgraham.com/when.html | September 2024
There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no. Sometimes you should and sometimes you shouldn't, but the border between should and shouldn't is very complicated. The only way to give a general answer ... | 1,545 |
Paul Graham | Founder Mode | http://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html | September 2024
At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they'd ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time in his life, forgot to take notes. I'm not going to try to reproduce it here. Instead I want to talk ... | 1,244 |
Paul Graham | The Right Kind of Stubborn | http://paulgraham.com/persistence.html | July 2024
Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find something that does.
Mere obstinacy, on the other hand, is a recipe for failure. Obstinate people are so annoying. They won't listen. They beat their heads aga... | 1,936 |
Paul Graham | The Reddits | http://paulgraham.com/reddits.html | March 2024
I met the Reddits before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they were one of the reasons we started it.
YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (the undergrad computer club) about how to start a startup. Everyone else in the audience was probably local, but Steve and Alexis ... | 1,168 |
Paul Graham | How to Start Google | http://paulgraham.com/google.html | March 2024
_(This is a talk I gave to 14 and 15 year olds about what to do now if they might want to start a startup later. Lots of schools think they should tell students something about startups. This is what I think they should tell them.)_
Most of you probably think that when you're released into the so-... | 2,827 |
Paul Graham | The Best Essay | http://paulgraham.com/best.html | March 2024
Despite its title this isn't meant to be the best essay. My goal here is to figure out what the best essay would be like.
It would be well-written, but you can write well about any topic. What made it special would be what it was about.
Obviously some topics would be better than others. It pro... | 4,338 |
Paul Graham | Superlinear Returns | http://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html | October 2023
One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.
Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. "You get out," I heard a thousand times, "what you put in." They meant well,... | 4,259 |
Paul Graham | How to Get New Ideas | http://paulgraham.com/getideas.html | January 2023
_([_Someone_](https://twitter.com/stef/status/1617222428727586816) fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. This is what I would have said.)_
The way to get new... | 147 |
Paul Graham | The Need to Read | http://paulgraham.com/read.html | November 2022
In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer.
That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just because ... | 446 |
Paul Graham | What You (Want to)* Want | http://paulgraham.com/want.html | November 2022
Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent contradiction between being made of matter that behaves in a predictable way, and the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I wanted. At the time I had a self-interested motive for exploring the question. At that age (like most succeeding age... | 511 |
Paul Graham | Alien Truth | http://paulgraham.com/alien.html | October 2022
If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're true by definition. Ditto for the truths of physics; the mass of a carbon atom would be the same on their planet. But I think we'd sha... | 684 |
Paul Graham | What I've Learned from Users | http://paulgraham.com/users.html | September 2022
I recently told applicants to Y Combinator that the best advice I could give for getting in, per word, was
> Explain what you've learned from users.
That tests a lot of things: whether you're paying attention to users, how well you understand them, and even how much they need what you're mak... | 2,195 |
Paul Graham | Heresy | http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html | April 2022
One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy.
In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College:
> Supported comfortably, Newton was free to devote himself w... | 2,114 |
Paul Graham | Putting Ideas into Words | http://paulgraham.com/words.html | February 2022
Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won'... | 1,164 |
Paul Graham | Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste? | http://paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html | November 2021
_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.)_
When I was a kid, I'd have said there wasn't. My father told me so. Some people like some things, and other people like other things, and who's to say who's right?
It seemed so obvious that there was no such thing as good taste ... | 1,124 |
Paul Graham | Beyond Smart | http://paulgraham.com/smart.html | October 2021
If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about... | 1,422 |
Paul Graham | Weird Languages | http://paulgraham.com/weird.html | August 2021
When people say that in their experience all programming languages are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about languages but about the kind of programming they've done.
99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions. All popular languages are equally... | 348 |
Paul Graham | How to Work Hard | http://paulgraham.com/hwh.html | June 2021
It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard. Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they chose not to do it. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I was in school, the answer is definitely ... | 3,319 |
Paul Graham | A Project of One's Own | http://paulgraham.com/own.html | June 2021
A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he was working on. This made me as happy as anything I've heard him say -- not just because he was excited about his story, but because he'd discovered this way of working. Wo... | 2,510 |
Paul Graham | Fierce Nerds | http://paulgraham.com/fn.html | May 2021
Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinary social situations they are -- as quiet and diffident as the star quarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physics symposium. And for the same reason: they are fish out of water. But the apparent diffidence of nerds is an... | 1,248 |
Paul Graham | Crazy New Ideas | http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html | May 2021
There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly. If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I'd be very reluctant to say "That will never work."
Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the his... | 1,328 |
Paul Graham | An NFT That Saves Lives | http://paulgraham.com/nft.html | May 2021
[Noora Health](https://www.noorahealth.org/), a nonprofit I've supported for years, just launched a new NFT. It has a dramatic name, [_Save Thousands of Lives_](http://bit.ly/NooraNFT), because that's what the proceeds will do.
Noora has been saving lives for 7 years. They run programs in hospitals i... | 314 |
Paul Graham | The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty | http://paulgraham.com/real.html | April 2021
When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether more death sentences are given to some groups than others. But in practice the debate about the death pen... | 763 |
Paul Graham | How People Get Rich Now | http://paulgraham.com/richnow.html | April 2021
Every year since 1982, _Forbes_ magazine has published a list of the richest Americans. If we compare the 100 richest people in 1982 to the 100 richest in 2020, we notice some big differences.
In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ... | 2,584 |
Paul Graham | Write Simply | http://paulgraham.com/simply.html | March 2021
I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.
That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas.
And the further they'll read... | 511 |
Paul Graham | Donate Unrestricted | http://paulgraham.com/donate.html | March 2021
The secret curse of the nonprofit world is restricted donations. If you haven't been involved with nonprofits, you may never have heard this phrase before. But if you have been, it probably made you wince.
Restricted donations mean donations where the donor limits what can be done with the money. T... | 485 |
Paul Graham | What I Worked On | http://paulgraham.com/worked.html | 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 with strong feeli... | 13,815 |
Paul Graham | Earnestness | http://paulgraham.com/earnest.html | December 2020
Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about startups. The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as "earnest." This is not by itself a guarantee of success. You could be earnest but incapable. But when founders are both formidable (a... | 1,671 |
Paul Graham | Billionaires Build | http://paulgraham.com/ace.html | December 2020
As I was deciding what to write about next, I was surprised to find that two separate essays I'd been planning to write were actually the same.
The first is about how to ace your Y Combinator interview. There has been so much nonsense written about this topic that I've been meaning for years to ... | 3,425 |
Paul Graham | The Airbnbs | http://paulgraham.com/airbnbs.html | December 2020
To celebrate Airbnb's IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb.
What was special about the Airbnbs was how earnest they were. They did nothing half-way, and we could sense this even in the interview. Sometimes after we interviewed a s... | 1,102 |
Paul Graham | How to Think for Yourself | http://paulgraham.com/think.html | November 2020
There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to ... | 3,449 |
Paul Graham | Early Work | http://paulgraham.com/early.html | October 2020
One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach ... | 2,508 |
Paul Graham | Modeling a Wealth Tax | http://paulgraham.com/wtax.html | August 2020
Some politicians are proposing to introduce wealth taxes in addition to income and capital gains taxes. Let's try modeling the effects of various levels of wealth tax to see what they would mean in practice for a startup founder.
Suppose you start a successful startup in your twenties, and then li... | 439 |
Paul Graham | The Four Quadrants of Conformism | http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html | July 2020
One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to a... | 1,971 |
Paul Graham | Coronavirus and Credibility | http://paulgraham.com/cred.html | April 2020
I recently saw a [_video_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o) of TV journalists and politicians confidently saying that the coronavirus would be no worse than the flu. What struck me about it was not just how mistaken they seemed, but how daring. How could they feel safe saying such things?
... | 237 |
Paul Graham | How to Write Usefully | http://paulgraham.com/useful.html | February 2020
What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful.
To start with, that means it should be correct. But it's not enough merely to be correct. It's eas... | 2,868 |
Paul Graham | Being a Noob | http://paulgraham.com/noob.html | January 2020
When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out. Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true.
I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always talking to some startup working in a new field I know nothing about, or reading a book about a topic I don't understand well enough,... | 373 |
Paul Graham | Haters | http://paulgraham.com/fh.html | January 2020
_(I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often surprised by the attention they get as their companies grow, but it applies equally to anyone who becomes famous.)_
If you become sufficiently famous, you'll acquire some fans who like you too much. These people are sometimes calle... | 1,391 |
Paul Graham | The Two Kinds of Moderate | http://paulgraham.com/mod.html | December 2019
There are two distinct ways to be politically moderate: on purpose and by accident. Intentional moderates are trimmers, deliberately choosing a position mid-way between the extremes of right and left. Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they make up their own minds about ea... | 668 |
Paul Graham | Fashionable Problems | http://paulgraham.com/fp.html | December 2019
I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things.
Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conserva... | 190 |
Paul Graham | The Lesson to Unlearn | http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html | December 2019
The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.
When I was in college, a particularly earnest philosophy grad student once told me that he never cared what grade he got in a class, only what he learned in it. T... | 4,043 |
Paul Graham | Novelty and Heresy | http://paulgraham.com/nov.html | November 2019
If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy.
To discover new things, you have to work on ideas that are good but non-obvious; if an idea is obviously good, other people are probably already working on it. One common way for a good idea to ... | 255 |
Paul Graham | The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius | http://paulgraham.com/genius.html | November 2019
Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.
To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some group of people, and I'm going to choose b... | 2,636 |
Paul Graham | General and Surprising | http://paulgraham.com/sun.html | September 2017
The most valuable insights are both general and surprising. F = ma for example. But general and surprising is a hard combination to achieve. That territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable.
Ordinarily, the best that people can do is one without the othe... | 439 |
Paul Graham | Charisma / Power | http://paulgraham.com/pow.html | January 2017
People who are powerful but uncharismatic will tend to be disliked. Their power makes them a target for criticism that they don't have the charisma to disarm. That was Hillary Clinton's problem. It also tends to be a problem for any CEO who is more of a builder than a schmoozer. And yet the builder-ty... | 121 |
Paul Graham | The Risk of Discovery | http://paulgraham.com/disc.html | January 2017
Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn't a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don't seem risky either.
Biogra... | 216 |
Paul Graham | How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub | http://paulgraham.com/pgh.html | April 2016
_(This is a talk I gave at an event called Opt412 in Pittsburgh. Much of it will apply to other towns. But not all, because as I say in the talk, Pittsburgh has some important advantages over most would-be startup hubs.)_
What would it take to make Pittsburgh into a startup hub, like Silicon Valle... | 2,636 |
Paul Graham | Life is Short | http://paulgraham.com/vb.html | January 2016
Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long?
Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I sto... | 1,675 |
Paul Graham | Economic Inequality | http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html | January 2016
Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer. Nearly everyone who writes about the topic says that economic inequality should be decreased.
I'm interested in this question because I was one of the founders of a com... | 3,421 |
Paul Graham | The Refragmentation | http://paulgraham.com/re.html | January 2016
One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground. The creative class flocks to a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest.... | 7,187 |
Paul Graham | Jessica Livingston | http://paulgraham.com/jessica.html | November 2015
A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on it had been a "one-man show." It's sadly common to read that sort of thing. But the problem with that description is not just that it's unfair. It's also misleading. Much of what's most novel about YC is due to Jessica Livingston. If y... | 1,968 |
Paul Graham | A Way to Detect Bias | http://paulgraham.com/bias.html | October 2015
This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing anything about the applicant pool. Which is exciting because among other things it means third parties can use this technique to detect bias whether those doing the se... | 565 |
Paul Graham | Write Like You Talk | http://paulgraham.com/talk.html | October 2015
Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language.
Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write in a different language than they'd use if they were talking to a friend. The sentence structure and even the words are different. N... | 709 |
Paul Graham | Default Alive or Default Dead? | http://paulgraham.com/aord.html | October 2015
When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they ha... | 1,498 |
Paul Graham | Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice | http://paulgraham.com/safe.html | August 2015
I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand something important: why it's safe for startup founders to be nice people.
I grew up with a cartoon idea of a very successful businessman (in the cartoon it was always a man): a rapacious, cigar-smoking, table-thumping guy in his fif... | 785 |
Paul Graham | Change Your Name | http://paulgraham.com/name.html | August 2015
If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com, you should probably change your name.
The reason is not just that people can't find you. For companies with mobile apps, especially, having the right domain name is not as critical as it used to be for getting users. The problem with not ... | 759 |
Paul Graham | What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? | http://paulgraham.com/altair.html | February 2015
One of the most valuable exercises you can try if you want to understand startups is to look at the most successful companies and explain why they were not as lame as they seemed when they first launched. Because they practically all seemed lame at first. Not just small, lame. Not just the first step... | 377 |
Paul Graham | The Ronco Principle | http://paulgraham.com/ronco.html | January 2015
No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it.
And yet he's a super nice guy. In fact, nice is not the word. Ronco is good. I know of zero instances in which he has behaved ba... | 630 |
Paul Graham | What Doesn't Seem Like Work? | http://paulgraham.com/work.html | January 2015
My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors.
He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want to do. When you talk to him about his childhood, there's a clear watershed at about age 12, when he "got interested in m... | 483 |
Paul Graham | Don't Talk to Corp Dev | http://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html | January 2015
Corporate Development, aka corp dev, is the group within companies that buys other companies. If you're talking to someone from corp dev, that's why, whether you realize it yet or not.
It's usually a mistake to talk to corp dev unless (a) you want to sell your company right now and (b) you're suf... | 1,293 |
Paul Graham | Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In | http://paulgraham.com/95.html | December 2014
American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US. Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners take these jobs, we should train more Americans to be programmers. Who's right?
The technolog... | 924 |
Paul Graham | How to Be an Expert in a Changing World | http://paulgraham.com/ecw.html | December 2014
If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing confidence in our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience a belief survived, the less likely it would be false. Most people implicitly believe something like this about their opinions. And they're justified in doing so with opini... | 1,061 |
Paul Graham | How You Know | http://paulgraham.com/know.html | December 2014
I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. Wh... | 648 |
Paul Graham | The Fatal Pinch | http://paulgraham.com/pinch.html | December 2014
Many startups go through a point a few months before they die where although they have a significant amount of money in the bank, they're also losing a lot each month, and revenue growth is either nonexistent or mediocre. The company has, say, 6 months of runway. Or to put it more brutally, 6 months ... | 1,602 |
Paul Graham | Mean People Fail | http://paulgraham.com/mean.html | November 2014
It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few.
Meanness isn't rare. In fact, one of the things the internet has shown us is how mean people can be. A few decades ago, only famous people and professional writers got to publis... | 1,138 |
Paul Graham | Startup Investing Trends | http://paulgraham.com/invtrend.html | June 2013
_(This talk was written for an audience of investors.)_
Y Combinator has now funded 564 startups including the current batch, which has 53. The total valuation of the 287 that have valuations (either by raising an equity round, getting acquired, or dying) is about $11.7 billion, and the 511 prior t... | 2,955 |
Paul Graham | The Top of My Todo List | http://paulgraham.com/todo.html | April 2012
A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest [regrets of the dying](http://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/). Her list seems plausible. I could see myself -- _can_ see myself -- making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes.
If you had to compress them into a single piece of ... | 234 |
Paul Graham | Writing and Speaking | http://paulgraham.com/speak.html | March 2012
I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of being a good w... | 1,194 |
Paul Graham | How Y Combinator Started | http://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html | March 2012
Y Combinator's 7th birthday was March 11. As usual we were so busy we didn't notice till a few days after. I don't think we've ever managed to remember our birthday on our birthday. On March 11 2005, Jessica and I were walking home from dinner in Harvard Square. Jessica was working at an investment ban... | 1,447 |
Paul Graham | Defining Property | http://paulgraham.com/property.html | March 2012
As a child I read a book of stories about a famous judge in eighteenth century Japan called Ooka Tadasuke. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop. A poor student who could afford only rice was eating his rice while enjoying the delicious cooking smells coming from the food s... | 980 |
Paul Graham | Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998 | http://paulgraham.com/vw.html | January 2012
A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a [snapshot of Viaweb's site](http://ycombinator.com/viaweb). I thought it might be interesting to look at one day.
The first thing one notices is is how tiny the pages are. Screens were a lot smaller in 1998. If I remembe... | 869 |
Paul Graham | The Patent Pledge | http://paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html | August 2011
I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem without waiting for the government.
I've never been 100% sure whether patents help or hinder technological progress. When I was a kid I thought they helped. I thought they protected inventors from having their ideas stolen... | 680 |
Paul Graham | Subject: Airbnb | http://paulgraham.com/airbnb.html | March 2011
Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable [post](http://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb) about missing [Airbnb](http://airbnb.com). VCs miss good startups all the time, but it's extraordinarily rare for one to talk about it publicly till long afterward. So that post is further evidence what a rare bird Fred i... | 250 |
Paul Graham | Tablets | http://paulgraham.com/tablets.html | December 2010
I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android. The closest to a general term seems to be "mobile devices," but that (a) applies to any mobile phone, and (b) doesn't really capture what's distinctive about th... | 549 |
Paul Graham | The Acceleration of Addictiveness | http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html | July 2010
What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.
We wouldn't want to stop it. It's... | 1,273 |
Paul Graham | Persuade xor Discover | http://paulgraham.com/discover.html | September 2009
When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention is to seem extra friendly. You smile and say "pleased to meet you," whether you are or not. There's nothing dishonest about this. Everyone knows that these little social lies aren't meant to be taken literally, just as everyone knows that ... | 1,301 |
Paul Graham | Post-Medium Publishing | http://paulgraham.com/publishing.html | September 2009
Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it.
In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has th... | 1,773 |
Paul Graham | The List of N Things | http://paulgraham.com/nthings.html | September 2009
I bet you the current issue of _Cosmopolitan_ has an article whose title begins with a number. "7 Things He Won't Tell You about Sex," or something like that. Some popular magazines feature articles of this type on the cover of every issue. That can't be happening by accident. Editors must know they... | 1,446 |
Paul Graham | What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley | http://paulgraham.com/kate.html | August 2009
Kate Courteau is the architect who designed Y Combinator's office. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects. Though she'd heard a lot about YC since the beginning, the last 9 months have been a total immersion.
I've been around the startu... | 813 |
Paul Graham | The Trouble with the Segway | http://paulgraham.com/segway.html | July 2009
The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them. Someone riding a Segway looks like a dork.
My friend Trevor Blackwell built [his own Segway](http://tlb.org/#scooter), which we called the Se... | 379 |
Paul Graham | A Local Revolution? | http://paulgraham.com/revolution.html | April 2009
Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined.
The first is that startups may represent a [new economic phase](highres.html), on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. I'm not sure of this, but there seems a decent chance it's true. People are dramaticall... | 1,339 |
Paul Graham | Why Twitter is a Big Deal | http://paulgraham.com/twitter.html | April 2009
[Om Malik](http://gigaom.com/2009/04/03/google-may-buy-twitter-or-not-but-why-is-twitter-so-hot/) is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal.
The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precis... | 147 |
Paul Graham | The Founder Visa | http://paulgraham.com/foundervisa.html | April 2009
I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions, I'm going to risk making one. The single biggest thing the government could do to increase the number of startups in this country is a policy that would cost nothing: establish a new class of visa for s... | 391 |
Paul Graham | Five Founders | http://paulgraham.com/5founders.html | April 2009
_Inc_ recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years. How do you decide who's the most interesting? The best test seemed to be influence: who are the 5 who've influenced me most? Who do I use as examples when I'm talking to companies we fund? Who do I ... | 757 |
Paul Graham | How to Be an Angel Investor | http://paulgraham.com/angelinvesting.html | March 2009
_(This essay is derived from a talk at[AngelConf](http://angelconf.org).)_
When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. Seven years later I still hadn't started. I put it off because it seemed mysterious and complicated. It turns out to be easier than I expected,... | 3,947 |
Paul Graham | Why TV Lost | http://paulgraham.com/convergence.html | March 2009
About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It's clear now that even by using the word "convergence" we were giving TV too much credit. This won't be convergen... | 1,529 |
Paul Graham | Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. | http://paulgraham.com/maybe.html | February 2009
A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask "How could we make something like that happen here?" The [organic](siliconvalley.html) way to do it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live. That's how Silicon Valley happened. But could you shortcut the process ... | 1,912 |
Paul Graham | What I've Learned from Hacker News | http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html | February 2009
Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project--an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've learned ... | 2,859 |
Paul Graham | Keep Your Identity Small | http://paulgraham.com/identity.html | February 2009
I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.
As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on ... | 867 |
Paul Graham | After Credentials | http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html | December 2008
A few months ago I read a _New York Times_ article on South Korean cram schools that said
> Admission to the right university can make or break an ambitious young South Korean.
A parent added:
> "In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a person's future."
It w... | 2,385 |
Paul Graham | Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession? | http://paulgraham.com/divergence.html | December 2008
_(I originally wrote this at the request of a company producing a report about entrepreneurship. Unfortunately after reading it they decided it was too controversial to include.)_
VC funding will probably dry up somewhat during the present recession, like it usually does in bad times. But this ... | 1,350 |
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