https://paulgraham.com/feed_paulgraham.xml Paul Graham's Essays and Writings http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification python-feedgen en Mon, 12 Jan 2026 02:44:19 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/prop62.html If you're a California voter, there is an important proposition on your ballot this year: Proposition 62, which bans the death penalty.When I was younger I used to think the debate about the death penalty was about when it's ok to take a human life. Is it ok to kill a killer?But that is not the issue here.The real world does not work like the version I was shown on TV growing up. The police often arrest the wrong person. Defendants' lawyers are often incompetent. And prosecutors are often mo... https://paulgraham.com/prop62.html Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/lwba.html After a link to Beating the Averages was posted on slashdot, some readers wanted to hear in more detail about the specific technical advantages we got from using Lisp in Viaweb. For those who are interested, here are some excerpts from a talk I gave in April 2001 at BBN Labs in Cambridge, MA. https://paulgraham.com/lwba.html Sun, 01 Apr 2001 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/avg.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2001, rev. April 2003(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.) In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called Viaweb. Our plan was to write software that would let end users build online stores. What was novel about this software, at the time, was that it ran on our server, using ordinary Web pages as the interface.A lot of people could have been having this ... https://paulgraham.com/avg.html Wed, 01 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/javacover.html This essay developed out of conversations I've had with several other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious. It's not a critique of Java! It is a case study of hacker's radar.Over time, hackers develop a nose for good (and bad) technology. I thought it might be interesting to try and write down what made Java seem suspect to me.Some people who've read this think it's an interesting attempt to write about something that hasn't been written about before. Others say I will get in trouble... https://paulgraham.com/javacover.html Sun, 01 Apr 2001 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/popular.html (This article was written as a kind of business plan for a new language. So it is missing (because it takes for granted) the most important feature of a good programming language: very powerful abstractions.)A friend of mine once told an eminent operating systems expert that he wanted to design a really good programming language. The expert told him that it would be a waste of time, that programming languages don't become popular or unpopular based on their merits, and so no matter how good his... https://paulgraham.com/popular.html Tue, 01 May 2001 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/langdes.html (These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.)1. Programming Languages Are for People.Programming languages are how people talk to computers. The computer would be just as happy speaking any language that was unambiguous. The reason we have high level languages is because people can't deal with machine language. The point of programming languages is to prevent our poor frail human brains from being overwhelmed by a mass of detail.A... https://paulgraham.com/langdes.html Tue, 01 May 2001 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html (I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp — both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core is one of Lisp's distinguishing features, and the reason why, unlike other languages, Lisp has dialects.)In 1960, John McCarthy published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming s... https://paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html Tue, 01 May 2001 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/road.html (This article explains why much of the next generation of software may be server-based, what that will mean for programmers, and why this new kind of software is a great opportunity for startups. It's derived from a talk at BBN Labs.) In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I decided to start a startup. The PR campaign leading up to Netscape's IPO was running full blast then, and there was a lot of talk in the press about online commerce. At the time there might have been thirty act... https://paulgraham.com/road.html Sat, 01 Sep 2001 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/diff.html (rev. May 2002) (This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds.)When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most important of which was Fortran.Lisp embodied nine new ideas: 1. Conditionals. A conditional is an if-then-else construct. We take these for granted now. They were invented by McCarthy in the course of developing Lisp. (Fortran at that time o... https://paulgraham.com/diff.html Wed, 01 May 2002 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/taste.html "...Copernicus' aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system...."- Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution"All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed fanatically in his insistence that an airplane that looked beautiful would fly the same way."- Ben Rich, Skunk Works"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics."- G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology I was talking recently to ... https://paulgraham.com/taste.html Fri, 01 Feb 2002 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/power.html "The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid."- Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture In the discussion about issues raised by Revenge of the Nerds on the LL1 mailing list, Paul Prescod wrote something that stuck in my mind. Python's goal is regularity and readability, not succinctness. On the face of it, this seems a rather damning thing to... https://paulgraham.com/power.html Wed, 01 May 2002 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/icad.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. May 2002 "We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."- Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec In the software business there is an ongoing struggle between the pointy-headed academics, and another equally formidable force, the pointy-haired bosses. Everyone knows who the pointy-haired boss is, right? I think most people in the technology world not only recognize this cartoon charac... https://paulgraham.com/icad.html Wed, 01 May 2002 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/spam.html Like to build things? Try Hacker News. August 2002(This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc. An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering.)I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their message. They can circumvent any other barrier you set up. They have so far, at least. But they have to deliver their mess... https://paulgraham.com/spam.html Thu, 01 Aug 2002 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/desres.html (This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting of NEPLS.)Visitors to this country are often surprised to find that Americans like to begin a conversation by asking "what do you do?" I've never liked this question. I've rarely had a neat answer to it. But I think I have finally solved the problem. Now, when someone asks me what I do, I look them straight in the eye and say "I'm designing a new dialect of Lisp." I recommend this answer to anyone who doesn't like being ... https://paulgraham.com/desres.html Wed, 01 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/better.html (This article was given as a talk at the 2003 Spam Conference. It describes the work I've done to improve the performance of the algorithm described in A Plan for Spam, and what I plan to do in the future.)The first discovery I'd like to present here is an algorithm for lazy evaluation of research papers. Just write whatever you want and don't cite any previous work, and indignant readers will send you references to all the papers you should have cited. I discovered this algorithm after ``A P... https://paulgraham.com/better.html Wed, 01 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically diffe... https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html (This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.)It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they u... https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html If Lisp is so great, why don't more people use it? I was asked this question by a student in the audience at a talk I gave recently. Not for the first time, either.In languages, as in so many things, there's not much correlation between popularity and quality. Why does John Grisham (King of Torts sales rank, 44) outsell Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice sales rank, 6191)? Would even Grisham claim that it's because he's a better writer?Here's the first sentence of Pride and Prejudi... https://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html Thu, 01 May 2003 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/hp.html (This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.)When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work-- that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urg... https://paulgraham.com/hp.html Thu, 01 May 2003 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ffb.html We may be able to improve the accuracy of Bayesian spam filters by having them follow links to see what's waiting at the other end. Richard Jowsey of death2spam now does this in borderline cases, and reports that it works well.Why only do it in borderline cases? And why only do it once?As I mentioned in Will Filters Kill Spam?, following all the urls in a spam would have an amusing side-effect. If popular email clients did this in order to filter spam, the spammer's servers would take a serio... https://paulgraham.com/ffb.html Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/say.html Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion... https://paulgraham.com/say.html Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/gba.html To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer wants to or not.To add to the confusion, the noun "hack" also has two senses. It can be either a compliment or an insult. It's called a hack when you do something in an ugly way. But when you do somethi... https://paulgraham.com/gba.html Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/wealth.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. May 2004 (This essay was originally published in Hackers & Painters.) If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word "startup" dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages.Startups usually involve technology, so much so that the ph... https://paulgraham.com/wealth.html Sat, 01 May 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/gap.html When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There's a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone. You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of detective novels. A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten thousand games against an ordinary club player without losing once.Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. ... https://paulgraham.com/gap.html Sat, 01 May 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/gh.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. July 2004(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.) A few months ago I finished a new book, and in reviews I keep noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say nothing of "idiotic.''I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste people's time telling them things they already knew. It's more efficient just to give them the diffs. But I suppose that's b... https://paulgraham.com/gh.html Thu, 01 Jul 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/pypar.html In a recent talk I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project.I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know.Wh... https://paulgraham.com/pypar.html Sun, 01 Aug 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/essay.html Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure.Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one.ModsThe most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literatur... https://paulgraham.com/essay.html Wed, 01 Sep 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/bubble.html (This essay is derived from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.)I had a front row seat for the Internet Bubble, because I worked at Yahoo during 1998 and 1999. One day, when the stock was trading around $200, I sat down and calculated what I thought the price should be. The answer I got was $12. I went to the next cubicle and told my friend Trevor. "Twelve!" he said. He tried to sound indignant, but he didn't quite manage it. He knew as well as I did that our valuation was crazy.Yahoo was a speci... https://paulgraham.com/bubble.html Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/laundry.html As E. B. White said, "good writing is rewriting." I didn't realize this when I was in school. In writing, as in math and science, they only show you the finished product. You don't see all the false starts. This gives students a misleading view of how things get made.Part of the reason it happens is that writers don't want people to see their mistakes. But I'm willing to let people see an early draft if it will show how much you have to rewrite to beat an essay into shape.Below is the ol... https://paulgraham.com/laundry.html Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/polls.html A lot of people are writing now about why Kerry lost. Here I want to examine a more specific question: why were the exit polls so wrong?In Ohio, which Kerry ultimately lost 49-51, exit polls gave him a 52-48 victory. And this wasn't just random error. In every swing state they overestimated the Kerry vote. In Florida, which Bush ultimately won 52-47, exit polls predicted a dead heat.(These are not early numbers. They're from about midnight eastern time, long after polls closed in Ohio and ... https://paulgraham.com/polls.html Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/charisma.html , corrected June 2006Occam's razor says we should prefer the simpler of two explanations. I begin by reminding readers of this principle because I'm about to propose a theory that will offend both liberals and conservatives. But Occam's razor means, in effect, that if you want to disagree with it, you have a hell of a coincidence to explain.Theory: In US presidential elections, the more charismatic candidate wins.People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consiste... https://paulgraham.com/charisma.html Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/usa.html (This is a new essay for the Japanese edition of Hackers & Painters. It tries to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.)A few years ago an Italian friend of mine travelled by train from Boston to Providence. She had only been in America for a couple weeks and hadn't seen much of the country yet. She arrived looking astonished. "It's so ugly!"People from other rich countries can scarcely imagine the squalor of the man-made bits of America. In travel books they show y... https://paulgraham.com/usa.html Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/hs.html (I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us.I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you w... https://paulgraham.com/hs.html Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/start.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2005(This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.)You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.And that's kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doa... https://paulgraham.com/start.html Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html A couple months ago I got an email from a recruiter asking if I was interested in being a "technologist in residence" at a new venture capital fund. I think the idea was to play Karl Rove to the VCs' George Bush.I considered it for about four seconds. Work for a VC fund? Ick.One of my most vivid memories from our startup is going to visit Greylock, the famous Boston VCs. They were the most arrogant people I've met in my life. And I've met a lot of arrogant people. [1]I'm not alone in feeling... https://paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/college.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2005(Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.)Recently I've had several emails from computer science undergrads asking what to do in college. I might not be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in college. But I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought I was one. I was certainly a hacker, at least.HackingWhat should you do in college to become a good hacke... https://paulgraham.com/college.html Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/writing44.html (In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes—23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting.)I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad ... https://paulgraham.com/writing44.html Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/mac.html All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?I got a Powerbook at the end of last year. When my IBM Th... https://paulgraham.com/mac.html Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/bronze.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2005This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the summer—so even college students can participate.We know from Google and Yahoo that grad students can start successful startups. And we know from experience that some undergrads are as capable as ... https://paulgraham.com/bronze.html Sun, 01 Jan 1995 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html "Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002. Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine ben... https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html Fri, 01 Feb 2002 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/hiring.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. May 2005(This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.)The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?Like everything else in technology, the cost of starting a startup has decreased dramatically. Now it's so low that it has d... https://paulgraham.com/hiring.html Tue, 01 Feb 1994 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/opensource.html (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers. [1]More significant, I think, is which 52% they are. At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain w... https://paulgraham.com/opensource.html Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ladder.html Thirty years ago, one was supposed to work one's way up the corporate ladder. That's less the rule now. Our generation wants to get paid up front. Instead of developing a product for some big company in the expectation of getting job security in return, we develop the product ourselves, in a startup, and sell it to the big company. At the very least we want options.Among other things, this shift has created the appearance of a rapid increase in economic inequality. But really the two cases a... https://paulgraham.com/ladder.html Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/inequality.html (This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.)Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality. There are two ways to do it: give money to the poor, or take it away from the rich. But they amount to the same thing, because if you want to give money to the poor, you have to get it from somewhere. You can't get it from the poor, or they just end up where they started. You have to get it from the rich.There is of course a way to make the poor richer without simply shifting money from t... https://paulgraham.com/inequality.html Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/sfp.html The first Summer Founders Program has just finished. We were surprised how well it went. Overall only about 10% of startups succeed, but if I had to guess now, I'd predict three or four of the eight startups we funded will make it.Of the startups that needed further funding, I believe all have either closed a round or are likely to soon. Two have already turned down (lowball) acquisition offers.We would have been happy if just one of the eight seemed promising by the end of the summer. ... https://paulgraham.com/sfp.html Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ideas.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2005(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School.)How do you get good ideas for startups? That's probably the number one question people ask me.I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups?That might seem a stupid thing to ask. Why do they think it's hard? If people can't do it, then it is hard, at least for them. Right?Well, maybe not. What peopl... https://paulgraham.com/ideas.html Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. They're already stuck with a seller's market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the Bubble and still haven't invested. This by itself is not the end of the world. In fact, it's just a more extreme version of the norm in the VC business: too much money chasing too few deals.Unfortunately, those few deals now want less and less money, because it's getting so cheap to start a star... https://paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2005 Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the next gear.Few startups get it quite right. Many are underfunded. A few are overfunded, which is like trying to start driving in third gear.I think it would help founders to understand funding better—not just the mechanics of it, but... https://paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html Tue, 01 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/web20.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2005Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don't need it.I first heard the phrase "Web 2.0" in the name of the Web 2.0 conference in 2004. At the time it was supposed to mean u... https://paulgraham.com/web20.html Tue, 01 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.There are three variants of procrastination, depen... https://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html Thu, 01 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/love.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. January 2006To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that... https://paulgraham.com/love.html Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/whyyc.html , rev August 2009Yesterday one of the founders we funded asked me why we started Y Combinator. Or more precisely, he asked if we'd started YC mainly for fun.Kind of, but not quite. It is enormously fun to be able to work with Rtm and Trevor again. I missed that after we sold Viaweb, and for all the years after I always had a background process running, looking for something we could do together. There is definitely an aspect of a band reunion to Y Combinator. Every couple days I slip and c... https://paulgraham.com/whyyc.html Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/6631327.html , rev August 2009A couple days ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted a patent. It issued in 2003, but no one told me. I wouldn't know about it now except that a few months ago, while visiting Yahoo, I happened to run into a Big Cheese I knew from working there in the late nineties. He brought up something called Revenue Loop, which Viaweb had been working on when they bought us.The idea is basically that you sort search results not in order of textual "relevance" (as search engines ... https://paulgraham.com/6631327.html Sun, 01 Feb 1998 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html (This essay is derived from a talk at Google.)A few weeks ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted four patents. This was all the more surprising because I'd only applied for three. The patents aren't mine, of course. They were assigned to Viaweb, and became Yahoo's when they bought us. But the news set me thinking about the question of software patents generally.Patents are a hard problem. I've had to advise most of the startups we've funded about them, and despite years of experi... https://paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/randomness.html , rev August 2009Plato quotes Socrates as saying "the unexamined life is not worth living." Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to think, just as the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills.A lot of ancient philosophy had the quality — and I don't mean this in an insulting way — of the kind of conversations freshmen have late at night in common rooms: What is our purpose? Well, we humans are as conspicuously different from other animals as the ant... https://paulgraham.com/randomness.html Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 Startup School.)The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.We've now invested in enough companies that I've learned a trick for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones: they're the ones I have to keep repeating.So I'm going to number these points, and maybe with future startups I'll be able ... https://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html (This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.)Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?It wouldn't be surprising if it were hard to reproduce in other countries, because you couldn't reproduce it in most of the US either. What does it take to make a silicon valley even here?What it takes is the right people. If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley. [1]That's a strik... https://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html Mon, 01 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/america.html (This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.)Startups happen in clusters. There are a lot of them in Silicon Valley and Boston, and few in Chicago or Miami. A country that wants startups will probably also have to reproduce whatever makes these clusters form.I've claimed that the recipe is a great university near a town smart people like. If you set up those conditions within the US, startups will form as inevitably as water droplets condense on a cold piece of metal. But when I consider ... https://paulgraham.com/america.html Mon, 01 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/marginal.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. June 2006(This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.)A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage."Those guys must have been freezing!"That's one of California's hidden advantages: the mild climate means there's lots of marginal sp... https://paulgraham.com/marginal.html Thu, 01 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/island.html I've discovered a handy test for figuring out what you're addicted to. Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also, you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will have more than any house might.What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing? That's what you're addicted to. For example, if you find yo... https://paulgraham.com/island.html Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/copy.html When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways. Anything funny or gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two. The ideal medium seemed the short story, which ... https://paulgraham.com/copy.html Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/investors.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2006, rev. April 2007, September 2010In a few days it will be Demo Day, when the startups we funded this summer present to investors. Y Combinator funds startups twice a year, in January and June. Ten weeks later we invite all the investors we know to hear them present what they've built so far.Ten weeks is not much time. The average startup probably doesn't have much to show for itself after ten weeks. But the average startup ... https://paulgraham.com/investors.html Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/mit.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2006(This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.)Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup. But how common will that be?I'm sure the default will always be to get a job, but starting a startup could well become as popular as grad school. In the late 90s my professor friends used to complain that they couldn't get g... https://paulgraham.com/mit.html Sun, 01 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2006In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a question to answer on the fly.Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you ha... https://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html Sun, 01 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/goodart.html I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any better than anyone else's. There is no such thing as good taste.Like a lot of things I grew up believing, this turns out to be false, and I'm going to try to explain why.One problem with saying there's no such thing as good taste is that it also means there's no such thing as good art. If there were good art, then people who liked it would have better taste... https://paulgraham.com/goodart.html Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/foundersatwork.html (Foreword to Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.)Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It's that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely diff... https://paulgraham.com/foundersatwork.html Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How?What is wisdom? I'd say it's knowing what to do in a lot of situations. I'm not trying to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to figure out how we use the word. A wise person is someone who us... https://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/notnot.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2007(This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.)We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded. Three have been acquired: Reddit was a merger of two, Reddit and Infogami, and a third was acquired that we can't talk about yet. A... https://paulgraham.com/notnot.html Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/microsoft.html A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?Microsoft? He didn't say anything... https://paulgraham.com/microsoft.html Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/judgement.html There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there's a second much more common type of judgement where it isn't. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. We'd probably be happier if we realized which are and which aren't.The first type of judgement, the type where judging you is the end goal, include court cases, grades in classes, and most competitions. Such judgements can of course be mistaken, but because the goal is ... https://paulgraham.com/judgement.html Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html (This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2007 ASES Summit at Stanford.)The world of investors is a foreign one to most hackers—partly because investors are so unlike hackers, and partly because they tend to operate in secret. I've been dealing with this world for many years, both as a founder and an investor, and I still don't fully understand it.In this essay I'm going to list some of the more surprising things I've learned about investors. Some I only learned in the past year.Teachi... https://paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/unions.html People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age. In those days we had a large number of high-paying union manufacturing jobs that boosted the median income. I wouldn't quite call the high-paying union job a myth, but I think people who dwell on it are reading too much into it.Oddly enough, it was working with startups that made me realize where the high-paying union job came from. In a rapidly growing market, you ... https://paulgraham.com/unions.html Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/equity.html An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Should you take it? You're about to hire your first employee. How much stock should you give him?These are some of the hardest questions founders face. And yet both have the same answer:1/(1 - n)Whenever you're trading stock in your company for anything, whether it's money or an employee or a deal with another company, the test for whether to do it is the same. You should give up n% of your company if what you tra... https://paulgraham.com/equity.html Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/stuff.html I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars.It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don't have closets. In those days people's stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few de... https://paulgraham.com/stuff.html Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/head.html A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, a... https://paulgraham.com/head.html Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/die.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2007(This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk. I didn't mean this as an essay; I wrote it down because I only had two hours before dinner and think fastest while writ... https://paulgraham.com/die.html Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/colleges.html A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college.For me, as for a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good college was more or less the meaning of life when I was growing up. What was I? A student. To do that well meant to get good grades. Why did one have to get good grades? To get into a good college. And why did one want to do that? There seemed to be several reasons: you'd learn more, get better jobs, m... https://paulgraham.com/colleges.html Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college. I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the less honorable was to shock people. College was regarded as job training where I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively impractical thing to do. Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes or putting a safety pin through your ear, which were other forms of impressive impracticality then just coming into fashion.But I had some more honest motiv... https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html Sat, 01 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/webstartups.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2007(This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.)There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper.It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there's some device that's very expensive and made in small quantities. Then someone discovers how to make them cheaply; many more get built; and as a result ... https://paulgraham.com/webstartups.html Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html After the last talk I gave, one of the organizers got up on the stage to deliver an impromptu rebuttal. That never happened before. I only heard the first few sentences, but that was enough to tell what I said that upset him: that startups would do better if they moved to Silicon Valley.This conference was in London, and most of the audience seemed to be from the UK. So saying startups should move to Silicon Valley seemed like a nationalistic remark: an obnoxious American telling them that i... https://paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/newthings.html The fiery reaction to the release of Arc had an unexpected consequence: it made me realize I had a design philosophy. The main complaint of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. After years of working on it, all I had to show for myself were a few thousand lines of macros? Why hadn't I worked on more substantial problems?As I was mulling over these remarks it struck me how familiar they seemed. This was exactly the kind of thing people said at first about Viaweb, and Y Co... https://paulgraham.com/newthings.html Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/trolls.html A user on Hacker News recently posted a comment that set me thinking: Something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this — the nastiness. ... I just don't understand why people troll like they do. I've thought a lot over the last couple years about the problem of trolls. It's an old one, as old as forums, but we're still just learning what the causes are and how to address them.There are two senses of the word "troll." In the original sense it meant someone, usu... https://paulgraham.com/trolls.html Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html , rev May 2013(This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure out what we do. Even though Y Combinator is now 3 years old, we're still trying to understand its implications.) I was annoyed recently to read a description of Y Combinator that said "Y Combinator does seed funding for startups." What was especially annoying about it was that I wrote it. This doesn't really convey what we do. And the reason it's inaccurate is that, paradoxically, funding very early stage startups i... https://paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/boss.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2008, rev. June 2008Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.I began to suspect this after spending several years working with startup founders. I've now worked wit... https://paulgraham.com/boss.html Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implicatio... https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/heroes.html There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes.I'm not claiming this is a list of the n most admirable people. Who could make such a list, even if they wanted to?Einstein isn't on the list, for example, even though he probably deserves to be on any shortlist of admirable people. I once asked a physicist friend if Einstein was really as smart as his fame implies, and she said that yes, he was. So why isn't he on the list?... https://paulgraham.com/heroes.html Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/googles.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2008Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world. Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo—what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time—didn't sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo's or MSN's search box.Why isn't it? Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to ... https://paulgraham.com/googles.html Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/good.html (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.)About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick.Another thing we tell founders is not to worry too much about the business model, at least at first. Not because making money is unimportant, but because it's so much easier than building something great.A couple weeks ago I... https://paulgraham.com/good.html Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/lies.html Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.There may also be a benefit to us. We were all lied to as kids, and some of the lies we were told still affect us. So by studying the ways adults lie to kids, we may be able to clear our heads of lies we were told.I'm using the word "lie" in a very general sense: not just overt falsehoods, but also all the more subtle ways we mislead kids. Though "lie" has negative c... https://paulgraham.com/lies.html Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/distraction.html Note: The strategy described at the end of this essay didn't work. It would work for a while, and then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet on my work computer. I'm trying other strategies now, but I think this time I'll wait till I'm sure they work before writing about them.May 2008Procrastination feeds on distractions. Most people find it uncomfortable just to sit and do nothing; you avoid work by doing something else.So one way to beat procrastination is to starve it of distractions... https://paulgraham.com/distraction.html Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/cities.html Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) ... https://paulgraham.com/cities.html Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a talk in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way. Instead of hoping to get rich by building a valuable company and then selling stock in a "liquidity event," founders should start companies that make money and live off the revenues.Sounds like a good plan. Let's think about the optimal way to do this.One disadvantage of living off the revenues of your company is that you have to keep running ... https://paulgraham.com/prcmc.html Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2008Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want: most startups that die, die because they didn't do that. But the second biggest cause of death is probably the difficulty of raising money. Fundraising is brutal.One reason it's so brutal is simply the brutality of markets. People who've spent most of their lives in schools or big companies may not have been expos... https://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2008The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.When Microsoft and Apple were founded.As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn't matter much either way.If we've learned one thing from funding so m... https://paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/artistsship.html One of the differences between big companies and startups is that big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes. A startup walks like a toddler, bashing into things and falling over all the time. A big company is more deliberate.The gradual accumulation of checks in an organization is a kind of learning, based on disasters that have happened to it or others like it. After giving a contract to a supplier who goes bankrupt and fails to deliver, for examp... https://paulgraham.com/artistsship.html Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/highres.html For nearly all of history the success of a society was proportionate to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations. Those who bet on economies of scale generally won, which meant the largest organizations were the most successful ones.Things have already changed so much that this is hard for us to believe, but till just a few decades ago the largest organizations tended to be the most progressive. An ambitious kid graduating from college in 1960 wanted to work in the huge, glea... https://paulgraham.com/highres.html Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/divergence.html (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 time the result may be different. This time the number of new startups may not decrease. And that could be dangerous for VCs.When VC funding dried up after the Internet Bubble, startups dried up too. T... https://paulgraham.com/divergence.html Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/credentials.html 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 was striking how old fashioned this sounded. And yet when I was in high school it wouldn't have seemed too far off as a description of the US. Which means things must have been changing here.The course of... https://paulgraham.com/credentials.html Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/identity.html 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 forums?What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. ... https://paulgraham.com/identity.html Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. Watch how this essay was written. February 2009One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be?When I made the list there turned out to be 13: 1. Pick good co... https://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html 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 so much from working on it.GrowthWhen we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600 daily uniques. It's since grown to around 22,000. This growth rate is a bit higher than I'd like... https://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/maybe.html A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask "How could we make something like that happen here?" The organic 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 by funding startups?Possibly. Let's consider what it would take.The first thing to understand is that encouraging startups is a different problem from encouraging startups in a particular city. The latter is much more ... https://paulgraham.com/maybe.html Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/convergence.html 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 convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call "TV shows," but they'll watch them mostly on computers.What decided the contest for computers? Four forces, three of which on... https://paulgraham.com/convergence.html Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/angelinvesting.html (This essay is derived from a talk at AngelConf.)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, and also more interesting.The part I thought was hard, the mechanics of investing, really isn't. You give a startup money and they give you stock. You'll probably get either preferred stock, which means stock with extra r... https://paulgraham.com/angelinvesting.html Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/relres.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2009A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee could be called unlucky, but not hapless. Hapless impl... https://paulgraham.com/relres.html Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/5founders.html 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 find myself quoting?1. Steve JobsI'd guess Steve is the most influential founder not just for me but for most people you could ask. A lot of startup culture is Apple culture. He was the origina... https://paulgraham.com/5founders.html Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/foundervisa.html 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 startup founders.The biggest constraint on the number of new startups that get created in the US is not tax policy or employment law or even Sarbanes-Oxley. It's that we won't let the people who ... https://paulgraham.com/foundervisa.html Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/twitter.html Om Malik 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 precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.Curiously, the fact that the... https://paulgraham.com/twitter.html Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/revolution.html 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, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. I'm not sure of this, but there seems a decent chance it's true. People are dramatically more productive as founders or early employees of startups—imagine how much less Larry and Sergey would have achieved if they'd gone to work for a big company—and that scale of improvement can change social customs... https://paulgraham.com/revolution.html Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html "...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day."– Charles Dickens July 2009One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off ... https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. July 2009Now that the term "ramen profitable" has become widespread, I ought to explain precisely what the idea entails.Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. This is a different form of profitability than startups have traditionally aimed for. Traditional profitability means a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance of ramen profitability is that it buys you time. [1]... https://paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/segway.html 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, which we called the Segwell. He also built a one-wheeled version, the Eunicycle, which looks exactly like a regular unicycle till you realize the rider isn't pedaling. He has ridden them both to downtown Mountain View to get coffee. When he ride... https://paulgraham.com/segway.html Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/kate.html 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 startup world for so long that it seems normal to me, so I was curious to hear what had surprised her most about it. This was her list:1. How many startups fail.Kate knew in principle that startups were very... https://paulgraham.com/kate.html Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/determination.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2009Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on.We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is determination. At first we thought it might be intelligence. Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups succeed.... https://paulgraham.com/determination.html Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/nthings.html 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 attract readers.Why do readers like the list of n things so much? Mainly because it's easier to read than a regular article. [1] Structurally, the list of n things is a degenerate case of essay.... https://paulgraham.com/nthings.html Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/publishing.html 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 the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more? [1]A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8.6 cents a page. The Economist costs $7 for 8... https://paulgraham.com/publishing.html Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/discover.html 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 "Can you pass the salt?" is only grammatically a question.I'm perfectly willing to smile and say "pleased to meet you" when meeting new people. But there is another set of customs for being ingra... https://paulgraham.com/discover.html Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/really.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2009(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.)I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet?I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the ones on other topics are right, but I have no way to test them. The ones on startups get tested by about 70 people every ... https://paulgraham.com/really.html Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/apple.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too... https://paulgraham.com/apple.html Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/organic.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2010The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you. Apple was the first type. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Unlike most people who wanted comput... https://paulgraham.com/organic.html Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html 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 studying the paths from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were.So I started to pay attention ... https://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/top.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. July 2010I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the ... https://paulgraham.com/top.html Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/addiction.html 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 the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider t... https://paulgraham.com/addiction.html Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/future.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2010Two years ago I wrote about what I called "a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup funding:" the growing disconnect between VCs, whose current business model requires them to invest large amounts, and a large class of startups that need less than they used to. Increasingly, startups want a couple hundred thousand dollars, not a couple million. [1]The opportunity is a lot less unexploited now. Investors have poured into th... https://paulgraham.com/future.html Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2010When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and am... https://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/hiresfund.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2010The reason startups have been using more convertible notes in angel rounds is that they make deals close faster. By making it easier for startups to give different prices to different investors, they help them break the sort of deadlock that happens when investors all wait to see who else is going to invest.By far the biggest influence on investors' opinions of a startup is the opinion of other investors. There are very, ... https://paulgraham.com/hiresfund.html Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/seesv.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2010Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of place that has conspicuous monuments. But if you look, there are subtle signs you're in a place that's different from other places.1. Stanford UniversityStanford is a strange place. Structurally it is to an ordinary university what suburbia is to a city. It's enormously spread out, and feels surpr... https://paulgraham.com/seesv.html Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/superangels.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2010After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations.The trends we've been seeing are probably not YC-specific. I wish I could say they were, but the main cause is probably just that we see trends first—partly... https://paulgraham.com/superangels.html Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/founders.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2010 (I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.)1. DeterminationThis has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality would be intelligence. That's the myth in the Valley. And certainly you don't want founder... https://paulgraham.com/founders.html Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/tablets.html 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 the iPad.After a few seconds it struck me that what we'll end up calling these things is tablets. The only reason we even consider calling them "mobile devices" is that the iPhone preceded the iPad. ... https://paulgraham.com/tablets.html Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/control.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. December 2010Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened.Ten years ago that was true. In the past, founders rarely kept control of the board through a series A. The traditional series A board consisted of two founders, two VCs, and one independent member. More recently the recipe is... https://paulgraham.com/control.html Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/airbnb.html Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable post about missing Airbnb. 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 is. He's probably the nicest VC I know.Reading Fred's post made me go back and look at the emails I exchanged with him at the time, trying to convince him to invest in Airbnb. It was quite interesting to read. You can see Fred's mind at work as ... https://paulgraham.com/airbnb.html Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html 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 by big companies. Maybe that was truer in the past, when more things were physical. But regardless of whether patents are in general a good thing, there do seem to be bad ways of using them. And sinc... https://paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/hubs.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2011If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude. Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide.I wondered about this for years. I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions: smart, ambitious people went in, but no startups came out. But I was never able to figure out exactly what happened inside th... https://paulgraham.com/hubs.html Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/vw.html A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site. 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 remember correctly, our frontpage used to just fit in the size window people typically used then.Browsers then (IE 6 was still 3 years in the future) had few fonts and they weren't antialiased. If you wanted to make pages that looked good, ... https://paulgraham.com/vw.html Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/schlep.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. January 2012There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task.No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it... https://paulgraham.com/schlep.html Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/word.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. January 2012A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying.This caught my attention because earlier we'd noticed a pattern among the most successful startups, and it seemed to hinge on a different quality. We found the startups that did best were the ones with... https://paulgraham.com/word.html Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2012One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them.Don't worry, it's not a sign of we... https://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/property.html 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 shop. The owner wanted the student to pay for the smells he was enjoying.The student was stealing his smells!This story often comes to mind when I hear the RIAA and MPAA accusing people of steal... https://paulgraham.com/property.html Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html 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 bank at the time, but she didn't like it much, so she had interviewed for a job as director of marketing at a Boston VC fund. The VC fund was doing what now seems a comically familiar thing for ... https://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/speak.html 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 writer than being a good speaker.Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you're talking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you'll be perceived as having a good... https://paulgraham.com/speak.html Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/todo.html A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest 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 advice, it might be: don't be a cog. The 5 regrets paint a portrait of post-industrial man, who shrinks himself into a shape that fits his circumstances, then turns dutifully till he stops.The alarming thing is, the mistakes that produce these regrets... https://paulgraham.com/todo.html Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/swan.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2012I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing.The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas.The first rule I knew intellectually, but didn't really grasp till it happened to us. The to... https://paulgraham.com/swan.html Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/growth.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2012A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.If you want to start one it's important to understand that. Startups are so hard that you can't be point... https://paulgraham.com/growth.html Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/hw.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2012One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends before most other people. And one of the most conspicuous trends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups. Out of 84 companies, 7 were making hardware. On the whole they've done better than the companies that weren't.They've faced resistance from investors of course. Investors have a deep-seated bias against hardware. But investors'... https://paulgraham.com/hw.html Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2012The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way. ProblemsWhy is it so important to wo... https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/invtrend.html (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 to the current batch have collectively raised about $1.7 billion. [1]As usual those numbers are dominated by a few big winners. The top 10 startups account for 8.6 of that 11.7 billion. But there is a p... https://paulgraham.com/invtrend.html Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ds.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. July 2013One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. [1]Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There m... https://paulgraham.com/ds.html Mon, 01 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/convince.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2013When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors. They try to convince with their pitch. Most would be better off if they let their startup do the work — if they started by understanding why their startup is worth investing ... https://paulgraham.com/convince.html Thu, 01 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/herd.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. August 2013The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of course a recipe for exponential growth. When one investor wants to invest in you, that makes other investors want to, which makes others want to, and so on.Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly conclude that manipulating these forces is the essence of fundraising. They hear stories about stampedes to invest in success... https://paulgraham.com/herd.html Thu, 01 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/fr.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. September 2013Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something like Y Combinator or individual angels, then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company, and then (3) once the company is clearly succeeding, raise one or more later rounds to accelerate growth.Reality can be messier. Some companies raise money twice ... https://paulgraham.com/fr.html Sun, 01 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/before.html Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2014(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.)One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell my own kids?" My kids are little, but I can imagine what I'd tell them about startups if they were in college, and that's wh... https://paulgraham.com/before.html Wed, 01 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/mean.html 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 publish their opinions. Now everyone can, and we can all see the long tail of meanness that had previously been hidden.And yet while there are clearly a lot of mean people out there, there are next to none a... https://paulgraham.com/mean.html Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/pinch.html 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 before they're out of business. They expect to avoid that by raising more from investors. [1]That last sentence is the fatal one.There may be nothing founders are so prone to delude themselves abo... https://paulgraham.com/pinch.html Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/know.html 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. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?A few months ago, as I was reading Constance Reid's excellent biography of Hilbert, I figured out if not the answer to this qu... https://paulgraham.com/know.html Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ecw.html 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 opinions about things that don't change much, like human nature. But you can't trust your opinions in the same way about things that change, which could include practically everything else.When expert... https://paulgraham.com/ecw.html Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/95.html 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 technology companies are right. What the anti-immigration people don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to ... https://paulgraham.com/95.html Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html 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 sufficiently likely to get an offer at an acceptable price. In practice that means startups should only talk to corp dev when they're either doing really well or really badly. If you're doing really badly,... https://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/work.html 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 maths."He grew up in the small Welsh seacoast town of Pwllheli. As we retraced his walk to school on Google Street View, he said that it had been nice growing up in the country."Didn't it get boring when... https://paulgraham.com/work.html Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ronco.html 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 badly. It's hard even to imagine.When I first came to Silicon Valley I thought "How lucky that someone so powerful is so benevolent." But gradually I realized it wasn't luck. It was by being benevolent... https://paulgraham.com/ronco.html Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/altair.html 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 up a big mountain. More like the first step into a swamp.A Basic interpreter for the Altair? How could that ever grow into a giant company? People sleeping on airbeds in strangers' apartments? ... https://paulgraham.com/altair.html Sun, 01 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/name.html 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 having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company. Whereas (as Stripe shows) havin... https://paulgraham.com/name.html Sat, 01 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/safe.html 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 fifties who wins by exercising power, and isn't too fussy about how. As I've written before, one of the things that has surprised me most about startups is how few of the most successful founders are like... https://paulgraham.com/safe.html Sat, 01 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/aord.html 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 have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're d... https://paulgraham.com/aord.html Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/talk.html 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. No one uses "pen" as a verb in spoken English. You'd feel like an idiot using "pen" instead of "write" in a conversation with a friend.The last straw for me was a sentence I read a couple days ago: The ... https://paulgraham.com/talk.html Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/bias.html 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 selecting want them to or not.You can use this technique whenever (a) you have at least a random sample of the applicants that were selected, (b) their subsequent performance is measured, and (c) the... https://paulgraham.com/bias.html Thu, 01 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/jessica.html 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 you don't understand her, you don't understand YC. So let me tell you a little about Jessica.YC had 4 founders. Jessica and I decided one night to start it, and the next day we recruited my fri... https://paulgraham.com/jessica.html Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/re.html 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. And increasing economic inequality means the spread between rich and poor is growing too. I'd like to propose a hypothesis: that all these trends are instances of the same phenomenon. And more... https://paulgraham.com/re.html Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ineq.html 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 company called Y Combinator that helps people start startups. Almost by definition, if a startup succeeds, its founders become rich. Which means by helping startup founders I've been helping to increase econ... https://paulgraham.com/ineq.html Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/vb.html 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 stopped wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into... https://paulgraham.com/vb.html Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/pgh.html (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 Valley? I understand Pittsburgh pretty well, because I grew up here, in Monroeville. And I understand Silicon Valley pretty well because that's where I live now. Could you get that kind of startup ecosystem ... https://paulgraham.com/pgh.html Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/disc.html 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.Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus more on physics than alchemy or theology. The impression we get is that his unerring judgment led him straight to truths no one else had noticed. How t... https://paulgraham.com/disc.html Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/pow.html 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-type CEO is (like Hillary) probably the best person for the job.I don't think there is any solution to this problem. It's human nature. The best we can do is to recognize that it's happening, and to u... https://paulgraham.com/pow.html Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/sun.html 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 other: either surprising without being general (e.g. gossip), or general without being surprising (e.g. platitudes).Where things get interesting is the moderately valuable insights. You get those from small a... https://paulgraham.com/sun.html Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/genius.html 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 bus ticket collectors. There are people who collect old bus tickets. Like many collectors, they have an obsessive interest in the minutiae of what they collect. They can keep track of distinctions between ... https://paulgraham.com/genius.html Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/nov.html 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 be non-obvious is for it to be hidden in the shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very attached to. But anything you discover from working on such an idea will tend to contradict the mistaken... https://paulgraham.com/nov.html Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html 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. This stuck in my mind because it was the only time I ever heard anyone say such a thing.For me, as for most students, the measurement of what I was learning completely dominated actual learning in college. ... https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/kids.html 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 a kid, were uncool. They were dull and responsible and had no fun. And while it's not surprising that kids would believe that, to be honest I hadn't seen much as an adult to change my mind. Whenever I'd n... https://paulgraham.com/kids.html Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/fp.html 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 conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, ... https://paulgraham.com/fp.html Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/mod.html 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 each question, and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong.You can distinguish intentional from accidental moderates by the distribution of their opinions. If the far left opinion on some ... https://paulgraham.com/mod.html Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/fh.html (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 called "fanboys," and though I dislike that term, I'm going to have to use it here. We need some word for them, because this is a distinct phenomenon from someone simply liking your work.A fanboy is obsessive an... https://paulgraham.com/fh.html Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/noob.html 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, or visiting some new country where I don't know how things work.It's not pleasant to feel like a noob. And the word "noob" is certainly not a compliment. And yet today I realized something encouraging ab... https://paulgraham.com/noob.html Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/useful.html 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 easy to make a statement correct by making it vague. That's a common flaw in academic writing, for example. If you know nothing at all about an issue, you can't go wrong by saying that the issue is a complex ... https://paulgraham.com/useful.html Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/cred.html I recently saw a video 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?The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make pred... https://paulgraham.com/cred.html Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/orth.html "Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions."— Einstein There has been a lot of talk about privilege lately. Although the concept is overused, there is something to it, and in particular to the idea that privilege makes you blind — that you can't see things that are visible to someone whose life is very different from yours.But one of the most pervasive exam... https://paulgraham.com/orth.html Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html 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 aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-mi... https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/wtax.html 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 live for another 60 years. How much of your stock will a wealth tax consume?If the wealth tax applies to all your assets, it's easy to calculate its effect. A wealth tax of 1% means you get to keep 99% of ... https://paulgraham.com/wtax.html Sat, 01 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/early.html 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 the great work that lies beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They're too frightened even to ... https://paulgraham.com/early.html Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/think.html 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 say things no one else has realized yet.The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of other people make the same... https://paulgraham.com/think.html Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/airbnbs.html 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 startup we'd be uncertain what to do, and have to talk it over. Other times we'd just look at one another and smile. The Airbnbs' interview was that kind. We didn't even like the idea that much. Nor did use... https://paulgraham.com/airbnbs.html Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/ace.html 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 write something telling founders the truth.The second is about something politicians sometimes say — that the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people — and why this is mistaken.Keep readin... https://paulgraham.com/ace.html Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/earnest.html 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 (another of our words) and earnest, they're as close to unstoppable as you get.Earnestness sounds like a boring, even Victorian virtue. It seems a bit of an anachronism that people in Silicon Valley wo... https://paulgraham.com/earnest.html Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/worked.html 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 feelings, which I imagined made them deep.The first programs I tried writing were on the IBM 1401 that our school district used for what was then called "data processing." This was in 9th grade, so I was ... https://paulgraham.com/worked.html Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/donate.html 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. This is common with big donations, perhaps the default. And yet it's usually a bad idea. Usually the way the donor wants the money spent is not the way the nonprofit would have chosen. Otherwise there wo... https://paulgraham.com/donate.html Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/simply.html 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. Most readers' energy tends to flag part way through an article or essay. If the friction of reading is low enough, more keep going till the end.There's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means "leap ... https://paulgraham.com/simply.html Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/richnow.html 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 ancestor. There were 10 du Pont heirs alone. By 2020 the number of heirs had been cut in half, accounting for only 27 of the biggest 100 fortunes.Why would the percentage of heirs decrease? Not because in... https://paulgraham.com/richnow.html Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/real.html 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 penalty is not about whether it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.When I was a kid I imagined that it... https://paulgraham.com/real.html Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/nft.html Noora Health, a nonprofit I've supported for years, just launched a new NFT. It has a dramatic name, Save Thousands of Lives, because that's what the proceeds will do.Noora has been saving lives for 7 years. They run programs in hospitals in South Asia to teach new mothers how to take care of their babies once they get home. They're in 165 hospitals now. And because they know the numbers before and after they start at a new hospital, they can measure the impact they have. It is massive. For eve... https://paulgraham.com/nft.html Sat, 01 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/newideas.html 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 history of science, knows that's how big things start. Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world.Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fa... https://paulgraham.com/newideas.html Sat, 01 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/fn.html 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 illusion due to the fact that when non-nerds observe them, it's usually in ordinary social situations. In fact some nerds are quite fierce.The fierce nerds are a small but interesting group. The... https://paulgraham.com/fn.html Sat, 01 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/own.html 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. Working on a project of your own is as different from ordinary work as skating is from walking. It's more fun, but also much more productive.What proportion of great work has been done by people who... https://paulgraham.com/own.html Tue, 01 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/hwh.html 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 yes.One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork varied in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super h... https://paulgraham.com/hwh.html Tue, 01 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/weird.html 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 good at this. So one can easily spend one's whole career operating in the intersection of popular programming languages.But the other .5% of programming is disproportionately interesting. If you want to... https://paulgraham.com/weird.html Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/smart.html 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 Einstein. What was special about him was that he had important new ideas. Being very smart was a necessary precondition for having those ideas, but the two are not identical.It may seem a hair-spli... https://paulgraham.com/smart.html Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html (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 that it was only through indirect evidence that I realized my father was wrong. And that's what I'm going to give you here: a proof by reductio ad absurdum. If we start from the premise that there's no such thing a... https://paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/words.html 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't just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write them.Once you publish something, the ... https://paulgraham.com/words.html Tue, 01 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/heresy.html 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 wholly to whatever he chose. To remain on, he had only to avoid the three unforgivable sins: crime, heresy, and marriage. [1] The first time I read that, in the 1990s, it sounded amusingly medieval. Ho... https://paulgraham.com/heresy.html Fri, 01 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/users.html 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 making.Afterward I asked myself the same question. What have I learned from YC's users, the startups we've funded?The first thing that came to mind was that most startups have the same problems. No two have e... https://paulgraham.com/users.html Thu, 01 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/alien.html 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 share other truths with aliens besides the truths of math and physics, and that it would be worthwhile to think about what these might be.For example, I think we'd share the principle that a controlled... https://paulgraham.com/alien.html Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/want.html 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 ages) I was always in trouble with the authorities, and it seemed to me that there might possibly be some way to get out of trouble by arguing that I wasn't responsible for my actions. I gradually lost ... https://paulgraham.com/want.html Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/read.html 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 it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn't just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write. [1]Would th... https://paulgraham.com/read.html Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/getideas.html (Someone 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 ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge.Knowledge grows fractally. From a dist... https://paulgraham.com/getideas.html Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html 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 intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard."The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious. The first step is to ... https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html 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, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good as your competitor's, you don't get half as many customers. You get no customers, and you go out of business.It's obviously true that the ret... https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/best.html 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 probably wouldn't be about this year's lipstick colors. But it wouldn't be vaporous talk about elevated themes either. A good essay has to be surprising. It has to tell people something they don't already know.T... https://paulgraham.com/best.html Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/google.html (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-called real world you'll eventually have to get some kind of job. That's not true, and today I'm going to talk about a trick you can use to avoid ever having to get a job.The trick is to start your own com... https://paulgraham.com/google.html Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/reddits.html 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 came up on the train from the University of Virginia, where they were seniors. Since they'd come so far I agreed to meet them for coffee. They told me about the startup idea we'd later fund them to drop... https://paulgraham.com/reddits.html Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/persistence.html 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 against a wall and get nowhere.But is there any real difference between these two cases? Are persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently? Or are they doing the same thing, and we just la... https://paulgraham.com/persistence.html Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html 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 about a question it raised.The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run ... https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/when.html 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 is to trace it.When people talk about this question, there's always an implicit "instead of." All other things being equal, why wouldn't you work on what interests you the most? So even raising the qu... https://paulgraham.com/when.html Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/writes.html 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 a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting up computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many people need help writing.The reason so many people have trouble writing is tha... https://paulgraham.com/writes.html Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/woke.html 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 that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it's an instance of a much older one.There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who dem... https://paulgraham.com/woke.html Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/do.html 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 answer it.So what should one do? One should help people, and take care of the world. Those two are obvious. But is there anything else? When I ask that, the answer that pops up is Make good new thi... https://paulgraham.com/do.html Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html 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 painted. And yet I don't think they are. I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true. Let's ... https://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/field.html 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 essay. For example, you might write a good essay about a particular model of car. Readers would learn something from it. It would add to their picture of the world. For a handful of readers it might even ... https://paulgraham.com/field.html Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html 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 studying the paths from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were.So I started to pay attention ... https://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/kids.html 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 a kid, were uncool. They were dull and responsible and had no fun. And while it's not surprising that kids would believe that, to be honest I hadn't seen much as an adult to change my mind. Whenever I'd n... https://paulgraham.com/kids.html Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html 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 intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard."The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious. The first step is to ... https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000