paul graham essays ideas

Paul Graham 101

There’s probably no one who knows more about startups than Paul Graham. Having helped thousands of startups through Y Combinator, the startup accelerator he co-founded, there’s a thing or two to learn from his essays. And Graham’s wisdom isn’t limited to startups either; his essays, read by millions, touch on education, intelligence, writing, society, the human mind, and much more.

I’ve read all of Paul Graham’s published essays (200+), ending up with enough notes to fill a book. This post tries to summarize the parts I’ve found most insightful and provide an accessible starting point for someone new to Graham.

Whenever possible, I’ve included links to his essays so you can easily go to the source when something interesting catches your eye. (Indeed, I recommend it - use this post as a gateway to the good stuff rather than a complete account in itself).

If my description of Graham’s idea sounds interesting, expect his essay to be 100x better. Always go back to the essays, where the ideas are fleshed out in full. This post is a very shallow overview.

Nevertheless, I hope this post inspires you to read Graham’s essays. They’re worth your time.

Boring disclaimer stuff:

• I made a Google Docs version of this post, in case that's easier to navigate.
• I’ve included all essays that were published before November 2021 ( Beyond Smart is the latest essay included). You can find a list of all essays on Graham’s site .
• The info included is based on my interests at the time of reading the posts. Had I read an essay a year earlier or later, I’d likely have included something else. Plus, with over 200 essays, I’ve just downright overlooked and forgot important stuff. Again, I recommend you explore the essays yourself.
• This post does NOT cover Paul Graham’s thoughts or essays on programming / coding. I’m simply not interested in or knowledgeable about that stuff, so I didn't think it fair to talk about it. He’s written a lot about coding, so if that’s your interest, explore his essays yourself.
• Finally, if something seem off or missing, let me hear about it and I’ll fix it: [email protected] / Twitter

Okay, let’s jump in.

Paul Graham on Startups

Unsurprisingly, many of Graham’s essays are startup-related. Given his experience on the topic, there’s a lot to unwrap, including some classics like “Ramen Profitable”, “Do Things that Don’t Scale” and “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule”. Let’s start with an overview.

Startups in 13 sentences :

• Pick good co-founders.
• Launch fast.
• Let your idea evolve.
• Understand your users.
• Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
• Offer surprisingly good customer service.
• You make what you measure.
• Spend little.
• Get ramen profitable.
• Avoid distractions.
• Don't get demoralized.
• Don't give up.
• Deals fall through.

For a detailed account, try How to Start a Startup . 

This section presents some of Graham’s core ideas around startups, including the principles above.

Essays mentioned in this section:

Startups in 13 sentences

How to Start a Startup

Startup = Growth  

How to Make Wealth

After Credentials

The Lesson to Unlearn

The Power of the Marginal

News from the Front

A Student's Guide to Startups

What Startups Are Really Like

Before the Startup

Hiring is Obsolete

Why to Not Not Start a Startup

The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn

Organic Startup Ideas

Six Principles for Making New Things

Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

Black Swan Farming

Crazy New Ideas

Why There Aren't More Googles

Ideas for Startups

Jessica Livingston

Startup FAQ

Earnestness

Relentlessly Resourceful

A Word to the Resourceful

The Anatomy of Determination

Mean People Fail

Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice

Design and Research

A Version 1.0

What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?

Beating the Averages

Do Things that Don't Scale

Ramen Profitable

Default Alive or Default Dead?

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Holding a Program in One's Head

How Not to Die

Disconnecting Distraction

Good and Bad Procrastination

Don’t talk to Corp Dev

The Top Idea in Your Mind

The Fatal Pinch

Startups are fundamentally different

Startups aren’t ordinary businesses. “ A startup is a company designed to grow fast ”, it is fundamentally different from your standard restaurant or hair salon. All decisions reflect this need to grow. Indeed, Graham says : “If you want to understand startups, understand growth”.

“Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.” (From How to Make Wealth )

Startups are also vastly different from your school experience. Your tests at school can be hacked, but success at startups is unhackable. At school, you learned that the way to get ahead is to perform well in a test, so you learned how to hack the tests . But in startups, you cannot really trick investors to give you money; the real hack is to be a good investment. You cannot really trick people to use your product; the real hack is to build something great. Valuable work is something you cannot hack.

So you don’t need to be a good student to be a good startup founder. In fact, if your opinions differ from those of your business teacher, that may even be a good thing (if your business teacher was excellent in business, they’d probably be a startup founder). In a startup, credentials don’t really matter - your users won’t care if you went to Stanford or got straight A’s. (Related: A Student's Guide to Startups ) . 

Starting a startup is fundamentally different from a normal job , too. In a startup, experience is overrated . The one thing that matters is to be an expert on your users and the problem; everything else can be figured out along the way. “The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean.” (From Hiring is Obsolete ). By starting a startup, you can figure out your real market value.

So, startups are fundamentally different from other companies, school and “normal work”. But why don’t more people start them? Graham has listed common excuses (and rebuttals) in Why to Not Not Start a Startup .

Startups are wealth-creation machines

So, startups are fundamentally different. You cannot really understand them by looking at other things. But what are they then?

Startups are one of the most powerful legal ways to get rich. If you’re successful, you can, in a few years, get so rich you don’t know what to do with all the money. But perhaps even better than the money is all the time a successful founder saves:

“Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life.” (From The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn ) 

In How to Make Wealth , Graham shows why startups are optimized for wealth-creation. (And for clarity, wealth is different from money: wealth is what people want, while money is merely the medium of exchange to get it. So a startup doesn’t actually create money, it creates wealth; in other words, it creates something people want, and people give money for that. This distinction may seem small but it’s important: “making money” seems really complicated while “making something people want” is far easier.)

Why are startups optimized for wealth-creation?

Leverage: If a startup solves a complex problem, it only needs to solve it once, then scale it infinitely with technology. So a startup, once it cracks the code, can create a lot of wealth rapidly. 

Measurement: The performance of every employee in a startup is easier to measure than the performance of every employee in a big organization. So if you perform well and create wealth, you’re in a better position to get paid according to your value in a startup.

More detail in How to Make Wealth . 

Good startup ideas come from personal need and they don’t sound convincing

While there are many ways you could get startup ideas, Graham has observed that most successful startups were founded because of a personal need. Fix something for yourself, and don’t even think that you’re starting a company. Just keep on fixing the problem until you find that you’ve started a company. (From Organic Startup Ideas )

He’s also observed that good ideas tend to come from the margins - places you’d not expect. The idea is often very focused - like a book store online or a networking site for university students - so it isn’t obvious how it would change the world; we dismiss the idea until it becomes obvious.

So, good ideas don’t initially sound like billion-dollar ideas - what even is a billion-dollar idea? Certainly not something we could recognize in advance. Indeed, the initial idea is usually so crude and basic that you’ll ignore it if you’re looking for a billion-dollar idea. The really big ideas may even repel you - they are too ambitious. 

A good idea doesn’t sound convincing because, for no one to have already taken it, it must be a bit crazy or unconventional. “The most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good. Which is not that far from a description of insanity, till you reach the point where you see results.” (From Black Swan Farming )

Indeed, when someone presents a crazy new idea to you, and if they are “both a domain expert and a reasonable person”, chances are that it’s a good idea (even if it sounds like a bad one). “If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don't. And if they have deep domain expertise, that's probably the source of it.”

Graham also emphasizes that it is not the idea that matters, but the people who have them. 

Oh, and "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." ( Graham quoting Howard Aiken )

Nevertheless, if you’re in need of inspiration, Graham has some good starting points for coming up with startup ideas.

Founders make the startup

“ The earlier you pick startups, the more you’re picking the founders. ” Throughout his essays, Graham emphasizes the importance of the founders. More than anything - target audience, trends, TAM… - a startup’s success is influenced by the founders. (Obviously, the other employees matter, too. But founders are special, they are the heart and soul of the startup.)

“Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard.” (from Startups in 13 Sentences ). 

Indeed, Graham notes that most successful startups tend to have multiple founders .

Earnestness and resourcefulness make a good founder

If the founders are the most important factor for a startup’s success, it is critical to understand what makes a good founder. Indeed, this is the topic of numerous essays.

According to Graham, a good founder is:

“The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as ‘earnest.’”

An earnest person does something for the right reasons and tries as hard as they can. The right reason usually isn’t to make a lot of money, but to solve a problem or satisfy an intellectual curiosity. This is why it’s important to figure out your intrinsic motivation or embrace your nerdiness (both of which we’ll discuss later).

“A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.”

Relentless = make things go your way

Resourceful = adapt and try new things to make things go your way

Relentlessly resourceful people know what they want, and they will aggressively try things out and “hustle” until they get what they want. Consider the Airbnb founders and selling cereal .

Graham noticed a pattern around resourcefulness: when he talks to resourceful founders, he doesn’t need to say much. He can point them in the right direction, and they’ll take it from there. The un-resourceful founders felt harder to talk to. 

It is not the most intelligent who succeed, but the most determined . Smart people fail all the time while dumb people succeed just because they decide they must. 

"Make something people want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there.

Oh, also: good founders aren’t mean. Mean People Fail and can’t get good people to work with them while startup founders who are nice tend to attract people to them .

Make something people want

If there’s one piece of startup advice to take from Graham, it’s this: “Make something people want”. (As you may know, this is also Y Combinator’s motto)

Yes, it is obvious. But it’s also pretty much the only thing that matters in a startup: if you just make something people want, you’ll attract users, employees, investors, money. “ You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives .”

Indeed, many early-stage startups are “ indistinguishable from a nonprofit ”, because they focus so much on helping the users and less so on making money. Funnily, this approach makes them money in the long term.

“In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product. For most, the cause of death is listed as ‘ran out of funding,’ but that's only the immediate cause. Why couldn't they get more funding? Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be done, or both.” (From How to Start a Startup ) 

So how do you make something people want? Get close to users, launch fast, then iterate.

Get close to users

“The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.” (From Startups in 13 Sentences ) 

“You have to design for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. It's much like being a doctor. You can't just treat a patient's symptoms. When a patient tells you his symptoms, you have to figure out what's actually wrong with him, and treat that.” (From Design and Research )

Since you may not precisely know who your users are and what exactly are their needs before you launch, it’s useful to yourself be a user of your product. If you use and like the product, other people like you may, too. This is why successful startups tend to arise from personal need.

Launch fast, then iterate

“The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.”

The importance of iterations is highlighted in “ A Version 1.0 ”, “ What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? ” and “ Early Work ”, among others. (If you understand the importance of iterations, then you understand that you must release a version 1 as soon as possible, so you can start iterating sooner.)

Some ideas from these essays:

• Don’t be discouraged by people’s ridicules of your early work. Just keep on iterating. (There will always be Trolls and Haters . Don’t mind them.)
• Don’t compare your early work with someone’s finished work. (If you wanted to compare your work to something, it’d optimally be a successful person’s early work. But people tend to hide their first drafts, precisely because they don’t want to be ridiculed.)
• When in doubt, ask: Could this really lame version 1 turn into an impressive masterpiece, given enough iterations?

Iterating and getting through the lame early work never gets easy. But Graham has listed some useful tips to trick your brain in “ Early Work ”.

Execution is a pathless land, but there is advice to be given

Mostly, a startup shouldn’t try to replicate what other startups do:

“If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.”

Startup execution is a pathless land; there’s no formula to follow, even though many blog posts and thought leaders want you to believe otherwise. This is why it’s so important for the founders to be earnest and relentlessly resourceful: they need to figure it out themselves.

Even though there isn’t a connect-the-dots type of way to succeed in the startup world, Graham has observed hundreds (if not thousands) of startups from a very close distance, so he has identified general principles that help:

Do Things that Don’t Scale

“Think of startups not only as something you build and you scale, but something you build and force to scale.” 

“Startups take off because the founders make them take off. If you don’t take off, it’s not necessarily because the market doesn’t exist but because you haven’t exerted enough effort.”

At some point, your startup may grow on autopilot. But before you’re there, you need to do seemingly insignificant things, like cold emailing potential clients, speaking to people at conferences or offering “ surprisingly good customer service ”.

The “Do Things that Don’t Scale” advice helps us remember that building something great is only one part of the equation; we must also do laborious, unscalable work to get initial growth, no matter how great the product is.

Get Ramen Profitable

Ramen profitability = a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses.

“Ramen profitability means the startup does not need to raise money to survive. The only major expenses are the founders’ living expenses, which are now covered (if they eat ramen).”

Significance: Ramen profitability means that the startup turns from default dead into default alive . The game changes from “don’t run out of money” into “don’t run out of energy”. While running a startup is never not stressful, reaching ramen profitability does take a weight off your shoulders.

To increase your startup’s chances of succeeding, increase your chances of survival; to increase your chances of survival, reach ramen profitability.

Maintain a Maker’s Schedule

To get into the making/building mindset, you need big chunks of time with no interruptions. You can’t build a great product in 1-hour units in-between meetings; “that’s barely enough time to get started”. If you think of the stereotypical coder, they prefer to work throughout the night, probably because no one can distract them at 3am.

“When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”

If you want to create great stuff, you need to be mindful that a manager and a maker operate on very different schedules. If you’re the manager, try to give big blocks of time for the maker; if you’re the maker, try to schedule all meetings on two days of the week so the rest is free for creating.

Holding a Program in One's Head expands on some of these ideas.

What not to do

Graham has also figured out something about the inverse: what not to do. Or, as he puts it, “ How Not to Die ”. 

• Keep morale up (don’t run out of energy)
• Don’t run out of money (for example, hire too fast)
• Don’t do other things. The startup needs your full attention. ( Procrastination is mostly distraction . Avoid distractions and you’ll avoid procrastination. Note, though, that you can procrastinate well .)
• Make failing unbelievably humiliating (to force you to give your everything)
• Simply don’t give up, especially when things get tough

To summarize this part on execution, here are Paul Graham’s Six Principles for Making New Things : 

• Simple solutions
• To overlooked problems
• That actually need to be solved
• Deliver these solutions as informally as possible
• Starting with a very crude version 1
• Then iterating rapidly

The more you focus on money, the less you focus on the product

Graham doesn’t often talk about money, and when he does, I get this weird feeling. It’s like “sure, we’re talking about money... but I’d rather we talk about the product instead.” Let me explain:

In Don’t talk to Corp Dev , Graham says all a startup needs to know about M&A is that you should never talk to corp dev unless you intend to sell right now. So it’s better to focus on the product until you absolutely must think about M&A.

In The Top Idea in Your Mind : “once you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mind”, instead of users and the product. So your product suffers.

When you get money, don’t spend it . “ The most common form of failure is running out of money ”, and you can avoid that by not spending money, not hiring too fast.

One instance when you should think about money is if your startup is default dead . “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?” If you know you’re default dead, your focus quickly shifts to turning the ship around and reaching profitability; avoiding The Fatal Pinch .

In the long term, it’s obvious that the company that focuses more on the users and product beats the company that obsesses over investors and raising money.

Paul Graham on What to work on

What to work on is one of the most important questions in your life, along with where you live and who you’re with. While Graham’s treatment of this question definitely leans on the side of startups, you can also view his ideas from the perspective of side hustles, hobbies, projects (in or outside of a career) and so on.

What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

Why Nerds are Unpopular

Fashionable Problems

How to Do What You Love

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

A Project of One's Own

Great Hackers

Follow intrinsic motivation

If it’s something you’re intrinsically motivated about, that’s something where you have infinite curiosity, and that’s something you’ll eventually do well in. (Later, we’ll discuss how curiosity leads to genius.)

“ If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for. ” Put another way: the stranger your tastes seem to other people, the more you should embrace those tastes. 

Because of the internet, you can make money by following your curiosity. This is a revolutionary shift : in the past, money was gained from a boring job, and you satisfied your curiosity during the weekends. But now, you can make real money just by following your curiosity, whether it’s from a startup or a YouTube or Gumroad account.

The two greatest powers in the world - money and curiosity - are getting more aligned each day. There has never been a greater time to follow your intrinsic motivation. Now, the important question is what to work on, not how to make money, because if you figure out an answer to the former, the latter question will answer itself. 

Turns out, nerds are far closer to figuring out the answer than non-nerds. (Nerds - or earnest people - do something for the sake of it, not to become popular or rich). Nerds in high school tend to be unpopular , not because they couldn’t figure out how popularity works and game the system, but perhaps because they don’t really want to be popular. That makes high school a tough time for them, but real life becomes much more fulfilling: while others are stuck in the popularity/status rat race and compete to work on Fashionable Problems , the nerds can follow their own curiosities, thus work on stuff no one else is working on, thus discover new things, thus succeed. Plus, they have a much nicer time doing so.

A question to figure out your intrinsic motivation and what to work on: “What are you a big nerd on?”

Let’s end this part with a sharp and practical observation from “ How to Do What You Love ”: 

“To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool.”

You should be working on your own projects

The logical conclusion of following your intrinsic motivation is that you should be working on your own projects (or other people’s projects where you have significant ownership). 

You may have noticed that projects you start on your own feel fundamentally different from tasks handed to you by a manager or teacher. And there’s a reason for that: “ You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss ”.

In that essay, Graham makes the argument that even though working in a large organization is the default now, it’s not how we evolved to work. A large organization is similar to the modern diet - consisting of pizza, candies and other processed foods - while a small group (like a startup) is the hunter-gatherer diet. One is easy and safe and appealing in the short term (but terrible over time) while the other is hard and unappealing, but more natural and better in the long term.

While working in smaller groups makes you happier and gives you more freedom, it’s also the way to do great work, as Graham argues in “ A Project of One’s Own ”. If a project feels like it’s your own, you have motivation and skin in the game that you don’t otherwise have. You’re much more willing to obsess over the details and make something great.

Work on things that you want to take over your life

“It's a mistake to insist dogmatically on ‘work/life balance.’ Indeed, the mere expression ‘work/life’ embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. [...] I wouldn't want to work on anything I didn't want to take over my life.” (From “ A Project of One’s Own ”)

For startup founders, the startup is their life - there is time for little else, even sleep. Why would they willingly work 80+ hours a week and eat nothing but ramen , with no guaranteed financial reward, when they could work 40 hours a week and eat lobster at a big company? Because the startup is a project of their own, and they have - hopefully consciously - decided it’s something they want to take over their lives. “People will do any amount of drudgery for companies of which they're the founders.”

How do you know if something has taken over your life? Here’s a simple test: Do you think about it in the shower? 

In “ The Top Idea in Your Mind ”, Graham argues that if something is really important to you, then your mind will think about it subconsciously and ideas will appear in your head whilst walking or showering. Indeed, if this does not happen, you’ll have trouble doing great work - that’s your sign to reconsider what you work on.

Paul Graham on Thinking & Decision-making

Startup founders are an interesting group of people: they seek to change something about the status quo, which means they see something non-obvious that could be improved and they believe in that improvement so much that they’re willing to work 80+ hours a week and eat ramen until their vision becomes a reality.

What drives them? It can’t be just money - there are so many founders who’ve already gotten rich, and they still work in their companies and start new startups. And why aren’t there more founders? What qualities are there in a founder that you don’t find in non-founders?

By trying to understand this group of people, Graham has discovered a lot about thinking, decision-making, and the human mind in general.

The Four Quadrants of Conformism

The Two Kinds of Moderate

Orthodox Privilege

Novelty and Heresy

How to Disagree

How to Think for Yourself

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

Is It Worth Being Wise?

Beyond Smart

How to Work Hard

Mind the Gap

Being a Noob

How to Be an Expert in a Changing World

How Art Can Be Good

Taste for Makers

The Island Test

Independent-mindedness vs conventional-mindedness

Independent-minded people prefer to think through things for themselves, and because of this, they may seem weird to conventional-minded people (who follow the average and agreeable). Hence, it is almost a tautology to say that new ideas and new startups are the work of independent-minded people.

In The Four Quadrants of Conformism , Graham goes a bit deeper and differentiates between aggressive and passive forms of independent-mindedness and conventional-mindedness. Notably, aggressively independent-minded people tend to question existing norms and rules, working against them, while aggressively conventional-minded people work to maintain the norms and rules. There’s a clash between the groups, so it’s important for independent-minded people to “be protected”, be given space to innovate, break norms and come up with new ideas and things. (These “protected areas” are important for innovation. You could think of Silicon Valley as one.)

If you know someone is conventional-minded, you know a lot about them. Their beliefs and actions match the average, and you know what the average is. Whereas, if someone is independent-minded, you don’t really know them; they think things through for themselves, and thus they may arrive at conclusions you can’t imagine. In fact, on one issue, independent-minded people can be in the political left, and on another issue, in the political right; they are politically moderate by accident . A conventional-minded person is more likely either in the left or right for every issue.

Conventional-minded people have what Graham calls Orthodox Privilege : it seems to them that everyone is safe to express their opinions because everything they think about is conventional and uncontroversial. “They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble.”

So if you do express your controversial, new ideas to them, they may regard them as untrue heresy. Novelty and Heresy go hand-in-hand. “It doesn't seem to conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It just seems to them that they're right.” To them, anything that is unconventional is likely to be false; to the independent-minded, anything too conventional seems suspicious. So if you express your independent-minded thoughts publicly, you may want to learn How to Disagree .

In How to Think for Yourself , Graham shows there are some types of work that you can only do well in if you think differently from others: Scientists aim to discover something new, so being conventional-minded won’t get you very far; an investor who thinks exactly like everyone else will not get rich; a startup founder who shares the same ideas as everyone else won’t build great new stuff. You need to be right and most other people need to be wrong.

Of course, not every type of work is like this. You can be a good administrative worker without thinking differently from others; it’s not essential that everyone else is wrong. Generally, independent-minded people want to work in areas where newness is rewarded.

In How to Think for Yourself , Graham shares some exercises for training your independent-mindedness muscles.

Genius comes from infinite curiosity, intelligence, hard work and courage

We tend to think some people are just blessed with genius, that it’s an innate thing. But Graham has taken this black box apart and argues genius is something you can influence.

“ Those who do really great work have an unexplainable obsession about something ”. Infinite curiosity leads to surprising discoveries, simply because you think about and play with the topic more than any rational person would expect. And all that thinking and tinkering feels like play to you (but looks like work to others) because an obsessive interest “is a proxy for ability and a substitute for determination”. 

Intelligence

There’s a difference between wisdom and intelligence . If wisdom means a high average outcome across all outcomes, intelligence is a spectacularly high outcome in a few situations. If we think of “genius”, it tends to fit the latter description: you can be a terrible fool about everything else, but if you discover relativity, you’re a genius. 

High curiosity in something + high intelligence in that domain are a great beginning. But not necessarily enough to discover important new ideas. As Graham elaborates in Beyond Smart , there are smart people, and then there are those who have important new ideas; “There are a lot of genuinely smart people who don’t achieve very much.”

Intelligence and curiosity are perhaps necessary to become a genius, but not sufficient; you also need hard work to uncover new ideas and courage to pursue them, as developing something new challenges your ego (and irritates the conventional-minded people).

Hard work and courage

Even when you’re undeniably brilliant, you cannot avoid hard work. (Indeed, just knowing How to Work Hard can get you closer to sheer brilliance.) Hard work in itself isn’t the goal, though. Output matters (output being, in this context, important new ideas): “ If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush .”

When you start to do or learn anything new, you’ll Be a Noob at it first. But “the more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.” In How to Be an Expert in a Changing World , Graham notes that if your opinion was right once, it may not be right anymore because the world has changed. So it takes intellectual humility and courage to update your opinions to the new world, instead of clinging to the opinions you formed in the old world.

Putting together Graham’s thoughts, it seems like genius is not an innate quality that you can’t influence, but a combination of multiple qualities like curiosity, intelligence, hard work and courage.

Good taste is necessary for good work

Good taste is a quality related to genius. Some people seem to have an “eye” for design or an “ear” for music, but Graham shows, again, that taste is something you can develop.

”Taste is subjective” isn’t true, and you see it as soon as you start designing or writing or building things. There’s good art and there’s bad art , good writing and bad writing, nice design and less nice design. Saying “taste is subjective” is lazy and won’t help you improve your work.

So if you want to create better stuff, you need to realize that you may have poor taste and you need to develop good taste, normally by getting better at your craft or studying those who have good taste. “Good work happens when you see something is ugly, understand why, and have the ability to fix it into something beautiful.” (From Taste for Makers )

So what is good art or design? Graham gives a list (I redacted a few points):

• Solves the right problem
• Often slightly funny
• Uses symmetry
• Resembles nature
• Often strange
• Often daring 

Good work isn’t necessarily the most popular work; “There are sources of error so powerful that if you take a vote, all you're measuring is the error.” But if you do good work, eventually, people will appreciate it.

Is your argument testable?

If you read Graham closely, you notice that often when he makes an argument, he immediately considers what kind of test is needed to validate the argument. He’s thinking like a scientist: only accepting an argument if it’s testable.

Watch him do it in How to Do What You Love :

 “To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.”

And in The Island Test , he presents a test to figure 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.”

In some cases, the way to make a point (and make it practical) is to devise a test. In How to Start a Startup , Graham explores what makes a good startup employee. He could just say “they are determined and will do whatever it takes”, but that’s not a testable argument, and not very practical for someone who’s hiring. 

Instead, Graham devised a test: “Could you describe the person as an animal?” If you could say “Jaakko is an animal” and don’t laugh but rather take the description seriously, that’s the person you want in your startup. An animal of a salesperson simply won’t take no for an answer; an animal of a programmer will stay up all night to finish the code; an animal of a PR person will pitch every newspaper in the city until your startup gets featured. 

Fun evening activity: Go through an essay you’ve written and see if each of the arguments you make is testable.

Paul Graham on Writing

Paul Graham is known for incredibly clear and simple writing. Each of his essays is easy to understand, no matter how complicated the topic. 

You can learn a lot about writing just by reading Graham, and doubly so if it’s an essay on the topic of writing. Fortunately for us, there are many such essays.

For starters, Graham has summarized his writing philosophy in Writing, Briefly . It’s an entire writing course, condensed into one (long) sentence. I recommend you read it now before continuing below.

Writing, Briefly

Writing and Speaking

The List of N Things

Persuade xor Discover

General and Surprising

The Age of the Essay

How to Write Usefully

Write Simply

Write Like You Talk

Economic Inequality

Writing is how you get ideas, develop ideas and improve your thinking

If you read Writing, Briefly , as you should, you noticed this:

“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.”

From an idea perspective, being a good writer is better than being a good speaker. You need good ideas to have good essays, but you can do a good speech without saying much at all. Though speeches can be better for motivation and personal touch, writing is better for ideas.

Don’t write to persuade, write to discover something new and useful

There are roughly two types of essays: those where you know exactly where it’s going before you start, and those where you have no clue where it’s going. 

We’re taught to write the first type of essay in school: we write the thesis statement in the introduction and ensure that the rest of the essay supports that thesis. We’re writing to persuade the reader, so that they’ll accept our thesis. A listicle is equivalent to that type of essay, and writing one doesn’t help you discover new ideas or knowledge. “ I worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously from ideas I knew would be hard to sell .”

Paul Graham is a supporter (and practitioner) of the second type, writing to discover. In his mind, an essay is supposed to be two things: new and useful.

An essay should be new

If an essay doesn’t share something new or surprising, what good is it? When we write to discover, we want to surprise ourselves and the reader. Most surprising = furthest from what people currently believe . 

But just anything new doesn’t cut it. There’s constantly new info and news, and that doesn’t make a difference in our lives. What we should aim for is something General and Surprising . “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).” If you can do some combination of general and surprising (at least to some people), you’ve got a winning essay.

“ Essays should aim for maximum surprise. ”

An essay should be useful

What does it mean for an essay to be useful? Graham offers some ideas in How to Write Usefully : 

• When something is useful, it’s correct. If it’s merely persuasive, it could be false. “Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.” (From The Age of the Essay ) 
• “Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false.”
• “Useful writing tells something important that people didn’t already know” (again, going back to the “surprise” idea)

Good writing is rewriting (in particular, rewriting to make the text simpler)

Just like in anything involving skill, the way to get better is through iterations. Good writing is rewriting . Because we can’t see someone’s drafts and rewrites, we compare their end product to our Early Work , then get discouraged looking at the gap. Instead, we must appreciate that something bad now could become great, if we iterate enough. 

“My strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an essay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting it very carefully.” (From How to Write Usefully ) 

And when you rewrite, your main goal is to make your writing simple . Most of the time, the simplest words and simplest sentences are better than decorative, complicated words. Your purpose is to convey an idea, not to use fancy words and make the reader “do extra work just so you can seem cool.”

In Write Like You Talk , Graham shares a trick for writing simply: explain your ideas to a friend by talking; then, use that transcript as a draft for your essay. The spoken and written version of your idea should be as close to each other as possible. “If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers.” 

When possible, find a metaphor for your idea

This is not direct advice from Graham (though he does recommend you write simply, and what’s simpler than a great metaphor?) 

Instead, this is a theme you notice if you read a lot of Graham. Metaphors are a weapon he wields often.

Some of my favorite metaphors from Paul Graham:

“There's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means ‘leap into the mouth.’ My goal when writing might be called saltintesta: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.” (From Write Simply )

“People don’t realize that scrapping things together is how big things get started. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding ‘there's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything.’” (From Do Things that Don’t Scale )

“The list of n things [listicle] is in that respect the cheeseburger of essay forms. If you're eating at a restaurant you suspect is bad, your best bet is to order the cheeseburger. Even a bad cook can make a decent cheeseburger. And there are pretty strict conventions about what a cheeseburger should look like. You can assume the cook isn't going to try something weird and artistic. The list of n things similarly limits the damage that can be done by a bad writer.” (From The List of N Things )

“Sometimes it's because the writer only has very high-level data and so draws conclusions from that, like the proverbial drunk who looks for his keys under the lamppost, instead of where he dropped them, because the light is better there.” (From Economic Inequality ) 

“If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.” (From Mind the Gap ) 

“I'm not sure why. It may just be my own stupidity. A can-opener must seem miraculous to a dog.” (From Taste for Makers )

“A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing: to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.” (From How to Make Wealth ) 

“The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, which require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, and to treat them as articles of faith. To an independent-minded person that would seem revolting, just as it would seem to someone fastidious about food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with a large variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and provenance.” (From How to Think for Yourself )

Paul Graham on Society

Startups turn into big companies, startup founders turn into billionaires , products used by hundreds turn into products used by millions... If you’re working to help startups, you’re working to change society in a big way. 

The Refragmentation

Inequality and Risk

What You Can't Say

“Reducing wealth inequality” isn’t as great as it sounds

As we established earlier, a startup is a wealth-creation machine. As such, it shouldn’t surprise us to see Graham discussing wealth inequality and why it isn’t the demonic thing many believe.

Wealth inequality is a divisive topic, and one I’m no expert in, so I’ll try to provide a general overview without twisting Graham’s ideas into something they aren’t. You might want to read the essays in full if you’re interested in the topic.

By default, we think wealth inequality is inherently bad. 

In Mind the Gap , Graham presents three reasons why we think wealth inequality is inherently bad:

• The Daddy Model of Wealth: We confuse wealth with money and think there is a fixed amount of it. And if there’s a fixed amount, we believe it should be distributed equally. (By now, you should realize that wealth is different from money, and that you can create wealth; there is no “fixed amount” or “fixed pie”; you can increase the pie)
• We think people get rich today like they got rich earlier: In the past, the rich people tended to get rich by stealing (through war or taxes). So some people still believe rich people have gotten rich by stealing, even though today the much better, more reliable, faster and legal way to get rich is by creating wealth, not stealing it.
• We don’t understand leverage: Technology increases the gap between the productive and the unproductive, thus increasing wealth inequality. If a CEO is 100x richer than an employee in the same company, we think it unjust because there’s no way the CEO works 100x more than they do. But because of leverage, the CEO can easily be 100x more productive than an employee, or make decisions that are 100x more valuable. “I have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another.”  

Wealth inequality can be a sign of good things.

“Variation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity. (In a society of one, they're identical.) And that is almost certainly a good thing: if your society has no variation in productivity, it's probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It's probably because you have no Thomas Edisons.

In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.” (From Great Hackers )

“By helping startup founders, you’re helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality should be decreased, no one should be helping founders. But that doesn’t sound right.” (From Economic Inequality )

There are many causes of economic inequality. Some of them are bad, like corruption and stealing. But some causes are generally good, like variation in productivity. Some people are vastly better at creating things people want, so it’s unsurprising they are able to make more money than other people.

Remember that startups grow the pie: they get rich by making other people richer. Because they are rich doesn’t mean you must have been screwed over. It’s more like the opposite: the Google founders are rich because they have made life easier and richer for billions of people.

Of course, wealth inequality isn't only due to startups (although startups create the most extreme results). Some people’s salaries are higher than others’, again, because some produce more wealth than others. Salaries are closer to market price than ever before , and get constantly closer, as people are more free to start their own companies, switch companies and work internationally.

Taxing the rich reduces economic inequality, but may not lead to the results you’d hope for. 

If you want to make the poor richer - as is probably the intention when you want to reduce economic inequality - you can either take the money from the rich, or make the poor more productive so they’ll get richer (through education and infrastructure, for example). But if you make people more productive, some people will create 1,000x the results as another, so economic inequality remains. 

So if you want to reduce economic inequality, the only way is to push from the top - to take money from the rich (see Inequality and Risk ). Thus, you reduce the rewards for creating or funding startups and business activity, thus you hinder technological innovation. This doesn’t sound as positive as “reducing economic inequality”. Especially when you consider the many different kinds of inequalities beyond income equality.

The gap between rich and poor is increasing in monetary terms, but probably closing in wealth terms. Today, the average person lives a relatively similar life, materially, to a rich person: both have a fridge, a car, a phone, Netflix… 100 years ago, the rich had a car while the poor didn’t, they had things we now regard as “essentials” while the poor didn’t. Through businesses, essential products are getting cheaper and more accessible to everyone. In many cases, the rich can pay to have a flashier version of something, like a sports car or brand watch, but the basic, affordable version is still good enough.

Today, the difference is appearance and what brand your stuff is; in the past, the difference was either having it or not having it. So yes, the income gap is increasing, but with it, the gap in quality of life is decreasing.

“You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.” (From Mind the Gap ) Trickle-down economics is a bad argument because it misses the point. We need to look at how wealth is created, not how it’s used

Graham’s proposition:

Allow those who create wealth to keep it.

When you’re allowed to keep the wealth you create, people can get rich by creating wealth instead of stealing it. People take bigger risks if they can keep more of the upside when those risks pay off. A startup founder never captures all of the wealth created; most of the wealth is transferred to other people, so we should encourage those who want to get rich, not discourage them.

Based on these ideas, you can probably guess Graham’s opinions on capitalism vs communism (something he discusses in the essays linked in this section, particularly in How to Make Wealth and Mind the Gap ).

Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false

“At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable.” (From Taste for Makers ) 

“And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.” (From Orthodox Privilege ) 

Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false.

Graham comes back to this idea repeatedly, particularly in the essays discussing independent-mindedness and conformism (see above). But you can see tones of this idea in his startup essays too; after all, a successful startup has a vision of a future that most other people do not believe in at the time. 

Graham deep-dives into this idea in What You Can't Say , an essay I consider one of his finest - one you must read for yourself. In fact, the whole essay is so intellectually important that I’d do it a disservice by summarizing. Instead, here’s the main takeaway I was left with:

There are things you believe that are incorrect, horribly so. To you, they seem correct without question. Stay open-minded.

Paul Graham on Life

If we accept that writing is thinking (as we addressed earlier), Graham, with over 200 essays and decades of writing, has done a lot of thinking. When he shares life wisdom, you’d be smart to listen.

What You'll Wish You'd Known is sort of Paul Graham’s compilation of life wisdom, targeted at high school students. It’s also one of his most popular essays. While you should read it yourself, here are a few major points that stood out for me:

• It’s okay to not have a plan. In fact, it may be better not to fixate on one plan when you’re young. Optimize for optionality. If you’re unsure, go with the option that gives you more options later down the line. 
• Build something. Work on something hard on your own, doesn’t really matter what it is. You’ll learn so much about yourself in that process. This is a shortcut to finding what you want to work on, which is one of the major questions in life. “If I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. [...] I should have spent less time worrying and more time building. If you're not sure what to do, make something.” (From The Power of the Marginal ) 
• How you succeed in school is in no way representative of how you succeed in life. “One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them.” At school, stuff is forced on you; in real life, it is the stuff you initiate that matters and defines your trajectory.
• “There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. That’s not how you become an adult. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [...] The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.”

Beyond that essay, there are a few bigger themes I want to highlight below.

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Life is Short

The Acceleration of Addictiveness

• How to Lose Time and Money

Lies We Tell Kids

Keep Your Identity Small

Cities and Ambition

The Top of My Todo List

Life is short

“Life is short” is one of those statements everyone kind of agrees with, without giving it too much thought. But Graham has explored the idea a bit deeper.

For starters, a startup itself is a way to appreciate the shortness of life or adapt to it ; instead of a 40-year career, you compress your income-making to a few startup years and thus free up time for activities beyond making a living. The average human lifespan is increasing while the minimum possible time it takes to be set for life is decreasing; startups are one way to maximize the gap.

Whether you agree with the premise that Life is Short , it’s easy to agree that one way to make life seem less short is to minimize anything unimportant. If you do nothing for 5 hours, that 5 hours will feel excruciatingly long. The more we have going on, the shorter life feels. So we should cut all the things we don’t like doing, the stuff that we think life is too short for (Graham calls this, bluntly, “bullshit”).

And if we invert the argument, we realize that we should dedicate more time for the important stuff. If people and relationships are important to you, your calendar should reflect that. When life is short, we must ruthlessly cut the unimportant while making time for the important. Sounds simple and easy to dismiss, but somehow, Graham applies weight to it in Life is Short .

It’s surprisingly easy to waste your life if you’re not careful

Since life is short, it’s easy to let it slip away in a blur if you’re not careful.

One thing you get easily sucked into is “ anti-tests ”. These are tests you can try to excel in, but the way to come on top is to not care about the test at all, to ignore the test. So you could try to be popular in school, but you probably shouldn’t care about popularity; you can try to become important and high-status in life, but you probably shouldn’t care about that. Just because there’s a test doesn’t mean you should try to perform well in it. 

Ignoring tests is especially hard for intelligent, ambitious people, because their ambition provides the motivation and intelligence the means to do well in the test. But try not to get sucked into the anti-tests in life; they are the kind of “bullshit” life is too short for.

Another thing that can corrode your life, if you’re not careful, is addiction. We know to be careful with the standard stuff like alcohol and gambling, but it’s harder to avoid addictions that everyone has because those seem normal to us. In The Acceleration of Addictiveness , Graham makes a division between two normals: statistically normal (that which everyone does) and operationally normal (that which works best). Being addicted to social media and your phone is statistically normal, but not operationally normal. “ Technology tends to separate normal from natural. ”

“ You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. ” For example, if your approach to consumerism doesn’t seem a bit weird, you probably own too much Stuff .

But being careful about pleasures and self-indulgence and “the bullshit” isn’t enough. We must also be careful about the things we do that feel important and productive. In How to Lose Time and Money , Graham writes: 

“It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking ‘wow, I'm spending a lot of money.’ Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.”

Similarly, for a fairly ambitious person, it’s hard to waste your time by watching TV or laying on the sofa - your brain will start thinking “this is a waste of time” sooner or later. But you can easily work 12h a day for 2 years on something that, in retrospect, was a complete waste of your time. 

If you’re not careful about where you invest your time and money, life passes by surprisingly easily. 

You have a lot of unconditioning to do

What’s a lie you were told as a child? Stuff like “if you swallow an apple seed, a tree will grow in your stomach” is easy to identify as a lie. But stuff like “be careful with strangers, they are dangerous”? Less so.

In Lies We Tell Kids , Graham shows that we’ve been lied to as kids, for a variety of reasons (some better than others). Some falsities have flowed into our heads at home, some at school, but the main idea is that we’ve woven lies into our understanding of the world at a young age. And if it’s something we learned as a child, it feels undeniably true as an adult; it takes serious effort to take apart these deep-held beliefs.

As a rule, if you think it’s true because you learned it in school or in your childhood, assume it is not true. It’s better to verify it for yourself, even if it turns out to have been true all along.

If childhood beliefs are a good place to start unconditioning, a good place to continue is whatever you identify as (democrat, minimalist, crypto bull…). This is because we have a terribly hard time thinking clearly about something that’s part of our identity , so you may have taken in opinions one-sidedly. If you identify as x, criticism against x feels like a personal attack because x is a part of your identity, part of you. The bigger your identity, the more you have to process and rethink. 

Another thing to uncondition comes from Cities and Ambition . When most people talk about the essay, they consider the obvious implication: you should go to the city that matches your ambition. So if you want to be in the show biz, go to Hollywood, or if you’re into startups, go to Silicon Valley (or, increasingly, the right corner of the internet). But there’s an inverse consideration, too, and it’s an important one: the places you’ve already lived in have subconsciously influenced your ambition. So, yes, we could match the city we live in to our ambition, but before we do that, we should figure out whether our ambition really is our own or if it’s simply a product of where we have lived in so far.

This idea of unconditioning links back to the earlier point: because you’ve been conditioned a certain way, you’re set on a path that you may not wish to be on, had you consciously made the choice. So unless you do uncondition yourself, it’s easy to waste your life.

You have a lot of unconditioning to do. So better get started.

Paul Graham’s 5 commandments for life

Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying:

• Forgetting your dreams
• Ignoring family
• Suppressing emotions
• Neglecting friends
• Forgetting to be happy with what you have

In The Top of My Todo List , Graham inverted the regrets into his 5 commandments to live by:

• Don’t ignore your dreams
• Don’t work too much
• Say what you think
• Cultivate friendships

Paul Graham’s Best Essays

Paul Graham’s favorites ‍

This is in addition to the three that get the most traffic: https://t.co/zsxRpKm4ew https://t.co/nROmN4eyhO https://t.co/O8hIcjcMd2 I should also have included: https://t.co/CUBGEQ9N7H https://t.co/bAcAN5wROL https://t.co/MVTTJDzyQ2 https://t.co/OKZOGIhi4i — Paul Graham (@paulg) December 20, 2019

My favorites

• What You Can't Say  
• How to Think for Yourself  
• You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss  
• How to Make Wealth  

Final words

This has been nothing but a short introduction to Paul Graham’s ideas. There are so many essays and ideas and topics that weren’t included here, so, who knows, maybe at some point there will be a PG 201. 

Anyhow, I hope this has inspired you to explore the essays yourself and gives you a convenient way to find the essays that interest you. 

If you found this summary useful, please feel free to share around. It took me nearly a year to read all the essays and turn my notes into something useful, so it’d be awesome if many people knew about this.

And if there’s something you’d like to add / edit, reach out: [email protected] / Twitter

Thanks for reading.

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Sharing ideas over a cup o' joe since 2015.

16 lessons from Paul Graham on starting a startup

Paul Graham runs Ycombinator, a Silicon Valley based startup incubator. He previously started and sold Viaweb to Yahoo.

Paul’s essays have had a tremendous impact on how I think about projects, business, and life.

Below are just a few of my own reflections as I’ve read through a few of the posts on his website.

Perhaps these lessons might help someone on their own startup journey.

Lessons from Paul Graham’s Essays

• Create an easy way for people to pay you for it.
• Create something that “a small number of people want a large amount”.
• The initial customer should initially be a single human, not an enterprise. While it may be an enterprise in the future, the first delivery channel should be via solving a unique and specific problem for someone.
• In order to do this, keep a list of stuff that annoys you, stuff that irritates you… Use it as fuel for the company.
• As the founder, you should use the product all the time.
• The problem should be easy for the founder to solve.
• Consistency is the greatest predictor of success.
• Execution wins 99% of the time, and persistence wins all of the time. 
• You will be able to make headway and really push the ball forward because the project is fresh in mind. 
• An unscalable process can become a service-based business, which can later be productized. Service co’s are easier to brute-force into existence.
• The activation energy of a service co. is much much lower than a product co. 
• Remember, users have other important stuff to think about besides your co.
• This can be done via a niche community that you are in some way a part of. If you’re not part of any special-interest groups, find one on reddit, twitter, or facebook groups from which to create a spark of interest. 
• Get the MVP in front of users ASAP. Leverage ChatGPT. Today is a unique and rare time with this new technology.
• Think of your initial version not as a product, but as a trick for getting users to start talking to you after they initial icebreaker. The MVP is just a way to have those 2nd level conversations with users.
• Use a medium that lets you work fast and doesn’t require much commitment up front… such as spreadsheets, notion, performing a service, typeform, stripe, email, airtable, google sheets, convert kit, etc. Lookup “email first startups” for more ideas
• Be careful if you charge for the core component… you may charge for add ons.
• Use the scientific method to formulate hypotheses about the “killer feature” in the product.
• Conversations with users are your way of testing the hypothesis.
• Even if the project itself is a failure, you’ll still be better from it.
• You need at least one reference-able customer and sale. This will help with future projects and customer acquisition.
• Could even write about “following the PG Approach”… basically just following Paul Graham’s advice that he shared on building a startup.
• Refer to the “micro-saas” movement on making modest but adequate stream of money. 
• Pick a name that you buy the .com of.

Anti-advice: follies to avoid

• Avoid risk & ruin.
• Avoid anything that feels scammy or incurs undue financial, regulatory, or compliance risk.
• Avoid creating a company that relies on yourself or another’s “personal brand”.
• Don’t build something that is bad for people.
• Don’t try to build a marketplace, and definitely don’t try to build a 2-sided marketplace.
• Don’t worry about competition.

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Get funded by . You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. Live in the future, then build what's missing. Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Lecture 3: Counterintuitive Parts of Startups, and How to Have Ideas Lecture 3: counterintuitive parts of startups, and how to have ideas lyrics. One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice to people you can ask yourself, "what would I tell my own kids?", and actually you'll find this really focuses you. So even though my kids are little, my two year old today, when asked what he'll be after two, said "a bat." The correct answer was three, but "a bat" is so much more interesting. So even though my kids are little, I already know what I would tell them about startups, if they were in college, so that is what I'm going to tell you. You're literally going to get what I would tell my own kids , since most of you are young enough to be my own kids. Startups are very counterintuitive and I'm not sure exactly why . It could be simply because knowledge about them has not permeated our culture yet, but whatever the reason , this is an area where you cannot trust your intuition all the time. It's like skiing in that way - any of you guys learn to ski as adults? When you first try skiing and you want to slow down, your first impulse is to lean back, just like in everything else. But lean back on the skis and you fly down the hill out of control. So, as I learned, part of learning to ski is learning to suppress that impulse . Eventually you get new habits, but in the beginning there is this list of things you're trying to remember as you start down the hill: alternate feet, make s-turns, do not drag the inside foot, all this stuff. Startups are as unnatural as skiing and there is a similar list of stuff you have to remember for startups. What I'm going to give you today is the beginning of the list, the list of the counterintuitive stuff you have to remember to prevent your existing instincts from leading you astray. The first thing on it is the fact I just mentioned: startups are so weird that if you follow your instincts they will lead you astray. If you remember nothing more than that, when you're about to make a mistake, you can pause before making it. When I was running Y Combinator we used to joke that our function was to tell founders things they would ignore, and it's really true. Batch after batch the YC partners warned founders about mistakes they were about to make and the founders ignored them, and they came back a year later and said, "I wish we'd listened." But that dude is in their cap table and there is nothing they can do. Q: Why do founders persistently ignore the partner’s advice? A: That's the thing about counterintuitive ideas, they contradict your intuitions, they seem wrong, so of course your first impulse is to ignore them and, in fact, that's not just the curse of Y Combinator, but to some extent our raison d'être . You don't need people to give you advice that does not surprise you. If founders' existing intuition gave them the right answers, they would not need us. That's why there are a lot of ski instructors, and not many running instructors; you don't see those words together, "running instructor," as much as you see "ski instructor." It's because skiing is counterintuitive, sort of what YC is—business ski instructors—except you are going up slopes instead of down them, well ideally. You can, however, trust your instincts about people. Your life so far hasn't been much like starting a startup, but all the interactions you've had with people are just like the interactions you have with people in the business world. In fact, one of the big mistakes that founders make is to not trust their intuition about people enough. They meet someone, who seems impressive, but about whom they feel some misgivings and then later when things blow up, they say, "You know I knew there was something wrong about that guy, but I ignored it because he seemed so impressive." There is this specific sub-case in business, especially if you come from an engineering background, as I believe you all do. You think business is supposed to be this slightly distasteful thing. So when you meet people who seem smart, but somehow distasteful, you think, "Okay this must be normal for business," but it's not. Just pick people the way you would pick people if you were picking friends. This is one of those rare cases where it works to be self indulgent. Work with people you would generally like and respect and that you have known long enough to be sure about because there are a lot of people who are really good at seeming likable for a while . Just wait till your interests are opposed and then you’ll see. The second counterintuitive point, this might come as a little bit of a disappointment, but what you need to succeed in a startup is not expertise in startups. That makes this class different from most other classes you take. You take a French class, at the end of it you've learned how to speech French. You do the work, you may not sound exactly like a French person, but pretty close, right? This class can teach you about startups, but that is not what you need to know. What you need to know to succeed in a startup is not expertise in startups, what you need is expertise in your own users. Mark Zuckerberg did not succeed at Facebook because he was an expert in startups, he succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups; I mean Facebook was first incorporated as a Florida LLC. Even you guys know better than that. He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups because he understood his users very well. Most of you don't know the mechanics of raising an angel round, right? If you feel bad about that, don't, because I can tell you Mark Zuckerberg probably doesn't know the mechanics of raising an angel round either; if he was even paying attention when Ron Conway wrote him the big check, he probably has forgotten about it by now. In fact, I worry it's not merely unnecessary for people to learn in detail about the mechanics of starting a startup, but possibly somewhat dangerous because another characteristic mistake of young founders starting startups is to go through the motions of starting a startup. They come up with some plausible sounding idea, they raise funding to get a nice valuation, then the next step is they rent a nice office in SoMa and hire a bunch of their friends, until they gradually realize how completely fucked they are because while imitating all the outward forms of starting a startup, they have neglected the one thing that is actually essential, which is to make something people want. By the way that's the only use of that swear word, except for the initial one, that was involuntary and I did check with Sam if it would be okay; he said he had done it several times, I mean use the word. We saw this happen so often, people going through the motion of starting a startup, that we made up a name for it: "Playing House." Eventually I realized why it was happening, the reason young founders go though the motions of starting a startup is because that is what they have been trained to do, their whole life, up to this point. Think about what it takes to get into college: extracurricular activities? Check. Even in college classes most of the work you do is as artificial as running laps, and I'm not attacking the educational system for being this way, inevitably the work that you do to learn something is going to have some amount of fakeness to it. And if you measure people’s performance they will inevitably exploit the difference to the degree that what you’re measuring is largely an artifact of the fakeness. I confess that I did this myself in college; in fact, here is a useful tip on getting good grades. I found that in a lot of classes there might only be twenty or thirty ideas that had the right shape to make good exam questions. So the way I studied for exams in these classes was not to master the material in the class, but to try and figure out what the exam questions would be and work out the answers in advance. For me the test was not like, what my answers would be on my exam, for me the test was which of my exam questions would show up on the exam. So I would get my grade instantly, I would walk into the exam and look at the questions and see how many I got right, essentially. It works in a lot of classes, especially CS classes. I remember automata theory, there are only a few things that make sense to ask about automata theory. So it's not surprising that after being effectively trained for their whole lives to play such games, young founders' first impulse on starting a startup is to find out what the tricks are for this new game. What are the extracurricular activities of startups, what are things I have to do? They always want to know, since apparently the measure of success for a startup is fundraising, another noob mistake. They always want to know, what are the tricks for convincing investors? And we have to tell them the best way to convince investors is to start a startup that is actually doing well, meaning growing fast, and then simply tell investors so. Then they ask okay, so what are the tricks for growing fast, and this is exacerbated by the existence of this term, "Growth Hacks." Whenever you hear somebody talk about Growth Hacks, just mentally translate it in your mind to "bullshit," because what we tell them is the way to make your startup grow is to make something that users really love, and then tell them about it. So that's what you have to do: that's Growth Hacks right there. So many of the conversations the YC partners have with the founders begin with the founders saying a sentence that begins with, "How do I," and the partners answering with a sentence that begins with, "Just." Why do they make things so complicated? The reason, I realized, after years of being puzzled by this, is they're looking for the trick, they've been trained to look for the trick. So, this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Gaming the system may continue to work, if you go to work for a big company, depending on how broken the company is, you may be able to succeed by sucking up to the right person; Giving the impression of productivity by sending emails late at night, or if you're smart enough changing the clock on your computer, cause who's going to check the headers, right? I like an audience I can tell jokes to and they laugh. Over in the business school: "headers?" Okay, God this thing is being recorded, I just realized that. Alright for now on we are sticking strictly to the script. But, in startups, that does not work. There is no boss to trick, how can you trick people, when there is nobody to trick? There are only users and all users care about is whether your software does what they want, right? They're like sharks, sharks are too stupid to fool, you can't wave a red flag and fool it, it's like meat or no meat. You have to have what people want and you only prosper to the extent that you do. The dangerous thing is, especially for you guys, the dangerous thing is that faking does work to some extent with investors. If you’re really good at knowing what you’re talking about, you can fool investors, for one, maybe two rounds of funding, but it's not in your interest to do. I mean, you're all doing this for equity, you're puling a confidence trick on yourself. Wasting your own time, because the startup is doomed and all you’re doing is wasting your time writing it down. So, stop looking for the trick. There are tricks in startups, as there are in any domain, but they are an order of magnitude less important than solving the real problem. Someone who knows zero about fundraising, but has made something users really love, will have an easier time raising money than someone who knows every trick in the book, but has a flat usage graph. Though, in a sense, it's bad news that gaming the system stops working now, in the sense that you're deprived of your most powerful weapons and, after all, you spent twenty years mastering them. I find it very exciting that there even exist parts of the world where gaming the system is not how you win. I would have been really excited in college if I explicitly realized that there are parts of the world where gaming the system matters less than others, and some where it hardly matters at all. But there are, and this is one of the most important thing to think about when planning your future. How do you win at each type of work, and what do you want to win by doing it? That brings us to our fourth counterintuitive point, startups are all consuming. If you start a startup, it will take over your life to a degree that you cannot imagine and if it succeeds it will take over your life for a long time; for several years, at the very least, maybe a decade, maybe the rest of your working life. So there is a real opportunity cost here. It may seem to you that Larry Page has an enviable life, but there are parts of it that are defiantly unenviable. The way the world looks to him is that he started running as fast as he could, at age twenty-five, and he has not stopped to catch his breath since. Every day shit happens within the Google empire that only the emperor can deal with and he, as the emperor, has to deal with it. If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole backlog of shit accumulates, and he has to bear this, uncomplaining, because: number one, as the company’s daddy, he cannot show fear or weakness; and number two, if you’re a billionaire, you get zero, actually less than zero sympathy, if you complain about having a difficult life. Which has this strange side effect that the difficulty of being a successful startup founder is concealed from almost everyone who has done it. People who win the one-hundred meter in the Olympics, you walk up to them and they're out of breath. Larry Page is doing that too, but you never get to see it. Y Combinator has now funded several companies that could be called big successes and in every single case the founder says the same thing, "It never gets any easier." The nature of the problems change, so you're maybe worrying about more glamorous problems like construction delays in your new London offices rather than the broken air conditioner in your studio apartment, but the total volume of worry never decreases. If anything, it increases. Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids; it's like a button you press and it changes your life irrevocably. While it's honestly the best thing—having kids—if you take away one thing from this lecture, remember this: There are a lot of things that are easier to do before you have kids than after, many of which will make you a better parent when you do have kids. In rich countries , most people delay pushing the button for a while and I'm sure you are all intimately familiar with that procedure . Yet when it comes to starting startups a lot of people seem to think they are supposed to start them in college. Are you crazy? What are the universities thinking – they go out of their way to ensure that their students are well supplied with contraceptives, and yet they are starting up entrepreneurship programs and startup incubators left and right. To be fair, the universities have their hand forced here. A lot of incoming students are interested in start-ups. Universities are at least de-facto supposed to prepare you for your career, and so if you're interested in startups, it seems like universities are supposed to teach you about startups and if they don't maybe they lose applicants to universities that do claim to do that. So can universities teach you about startups? Well, if not, what are we doing here? Yes and no, as I've explained to you about start-ups. Essentially, if you want to learn French, universities can teach you linguistics. That is what this is. This is linguistics: we're teaching you how to learn languages and what you need to know is how a particular language. What you need to know are the needs of your own users. You can't learn those until you actually start the company, which means that starting a startup is something you can intrinsically only learn by doing it. You can't do that in college for the reason I just explained. Startups take over your entire life. If you start a startup in college, if you start a startup as a student, you can't start a startup as a student because if you start a startup you’re not a student anymore. You may be nominally a student but you won't even be that for very much longer. Given this dichotomy: which of the two paths should you take? Be a real student and not start a startup or start a real startup and not be a student. Well, I can answer that one for you. I'm talking to my own kids here. Do not start a startup in college. I hope I'm not disappointing anyone seriously. Starting a startup could be a good component of a good life for a lot of ambitious people. This is just a part of a much bigger problem that you are trying to solve. How to have a good life, right. Those that are starting a startup could be a good thing to do at some point. Twenty is not the optimal time to do it. There are things that you can do in your early twenties that you cannot do as well before or after. Like plunge deeply into projects on a whim that seem like they will have no pay off. Travel super cheaply with no sense of a deadline. In fact they are really isomorphic shapes in different domains. For unambitious people your thing can be the dreaded failure to launch. For the ambitious ones it’s a really valuable sort of exploration and if you start a startup at twenty and you are sufficiently successful you will never get to do it. Mark Zuckerberg will never get to bum around a foreign country. If he goes to a foreign county, it's either as a de-facto state visit or like he's hiding out incognito at George V in Paris . He's never going to just like backpack around Thailand if that’s still what people do. Do people still backpack around Thailand? That's the first real enthusiasm I've ever seen from this class. Should have given this talk in Thailand. He can do things you can't do, like charter jets to fly him to foreign countries. Really big jets. But success has taken a lot of the serendipity out of his life. Facebook is running him as much as he's running Facebook. While it can be really cool to be in the grip of some project you consider your life's work, there are advantages to serendipity . Among other things, it gives you more options to choose your life's work from. There's not even a trade off here. You’re not sacrificing anything if you forgo starting a start up at twenty because you will be more likely to succeed if you wait. In the astronomically unlikely case that you are twenty and you have some side project that takes off like Facebook did, then you face a choice to either be running with it or not and maybe it’s reasonable to run with it. Usually the way that start ups take off is for the founders to make them take off. It's gratuitously stupid to do that at twenty. Should you do it at any age? Starting a startup may sound kind of hard, if I haven't made that clear let me try again. Starting a startup is really hard. If it’s too hard, what if you are not up to this challenge? The answer is the fifth counter intuitive point. You can't tell. Your life so far has given you some idea of what your prospects might be if you wanted to become a mathematician or a professional football player. Boy, it’s not every audience you can say that to. Unless you have had a very strange life indeed you have not done much that’s like starting a startup. Meaning starting a startup will change you a lot if it works out. So what you’re trying to estimate is not just what you are, but what you could become. And who can do that? Well, not me. for the last nine years it was my job to try to guess ( I wrote "predict" in here and it came out as "guess"—that’s a very informative Freudian slip ). Seriously it’s easy to tell how smart people are in ten minutes. Hit a few tennis balls over the net, and do they hit them back at you or into the net? The hard part and the most important part was predicting how tough and ambitious they would become. There may be no one at this point who has more experience than me in doing this. I can tell you how much an expert can know about that. The answer is not much. I learned from experience to keep completely open mind about which start ups in each batch would turn out to be the stars. The founders sometimes thought they knew. Some arrived feeling confident that they would ace Y Combinator just as they had aced every one of the few easy artificial tests they had faced in life so far. Others arrived wondering what mistake had caused them to be admitted and hoping that no one discover it. There is little to no correlation between these attitudes and how things turn out. I've read the same is true in the military. The swaggering recruits are no more than likely to turn out to be really tough than the quiet ones and probably for the same reason. The tests are so different from tests in people’s previous lives. If you are absolutely terrified of starting a startup you probably shouldn’t do it. Unless you are one of those people who gets off on doing things you're afraid of . Otherwise if you are merely unsure of whether you are going to be able to do it, the only way to find out is to try , just not now. So if you want to start a startup one day, what do you do now in college? There are only two things you need initially, an idea and cofounders. The MO for getting both of those is the same which leads to our sixth and last counterintuitive point. The way to get start up ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. I have written a whole essay on this and I am not going to repeat the whole thing here. But the short version is that if you make a conscious effort to try to think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible sounding. Meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them. You'll waste a lot of time before realizing they're no good. The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously. In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas. This is not only possible: Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple all got started this way. None of these companies were supposed to be companies at first, they were all just side projects. The very best ideas almost always have to start as side projects because they're always such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies. How do you turn your mind into the kind that has startup ideas unconsciously? One, learn about a lot of things that matter. Two, work on problems that interest you. Three, with people you like and or respect. That's the third part incidentally, is how you get cofounders at the same time as the idea. The first time I wrote that paragraph, instead of learn a lot about things that matter, I wrote become good at some technology. But that prescription is too narrow. What was special about Brain Chesky and Joe Gebbia from Airbnb was not that they were experts in technology. They went to art school, they were experts in design. Perhaps more importantly they were really good at organizing people in getting projects done. So you don't have to work on technology per se, so long as you work on things that stretch you. What kinds of things are those? Now that is very hard to answer in the general case. History is full of examples of young people who were working on problems that no one else at the time thought were important. In particular that their parents didn't think were important. On the other hand, history is even fuller of examples of parents that thought their kids were wasting their time and who were right. How do you know if you’re working on real stuff? I mean when Twitch TV switched from being Justin.tv to Twitch TV and they were going to broadcast people playing video games, I was like, "What?" But it turned out to be a good business. I know how I know real problems are interesting, and I am self-indulgent: I always like working on anything interesting things even if no one cares about them. I find it very hard to make myself work on boring things even if they're supposed to be important. My life is full of case after case where I worked on things just because I was interested and they turned out to be useful later in some worldly way. Y Combinator itself is something I only did because it seemed interesting. I seem to have some internal compass that helps me out. This is for you not me and I don't know what you have in your heads. Maybe if I think more about it I can come up some heuristics for recognizing genuinely interesting ideas. For now all I can give you is the hopelessly question begging advice. Incidentally this is the actual meaning of the phrase begging the question. The hopelessly question begging advice that if you’re interested in generally interesting problems, gratifying your interest energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup and probably best way to live. Although I can't explain in the general case what counts as an interesting problem I can tell you about a large subset of them. If you think of technology as something that’s spreading like a sort of fractal stain, every point on the edge represents an interesting problem. Steam engine not so much maybe you never know. One guaranteed way to turn your mind into the type to start up ideas for them unconsciously. Is to get yourself to the leading edge of some technology. To, as Paul Buchheit put it, "Live in the future." And when you get there, ideas that seem uncannily prescient to other people will seem obvious to you. You may not realize they're start up ideas, but you will know they are something that ought to exist. For example back at Harvard in the mid 90s. A fellow grad student of my friends Robert and Trevor wrote his own voice over IP software. It wasn't meant to be a startup, he never tried to turn it into one. He just wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan without paying for long distance calls. Since he was an expert on networks, it seemed obvious to him that thing to do was to turn the sound into packets and ship them over the internet for free. Why didn't everybody do this? They were not good at writing this type of software. He never did anything with this. He never tried to turn this into a startup. That is how the best startups tend to happen. Strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new vocational version of college focused on entrepreneurship. It's the classic version of college is education its own sake. If you want to start your own startup what you should do in college is learn powerful things and if you have genuine intellectual curiosity that’s what you’ll naturally tend to do if you just follow your own inclinations. The component of entrepreneurship, can never quite say that word with a straight face, that really matters is domain expertise. Larry Page is Larry Page because he was an expert on search and the way he became an expert on search was because he was genuinely interested and not because of some ulterior motive. At its best starting a startup is merely a ulterior motive for curiosity and you’ll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive at the end of the process. So here is ultimate advice for young would be startup founders reduced to two words: just learn. Alright how much time do we have left? Eighteen minutes for questions good god. Do you guys have the questions? Q: Sure we will start with two questions. How can a nontechnical founder most efficiently contribute to a startup? A: I f the startup is, if the startup is working in some domain, if it’s not a pure technology startup but is working in some very specific domain, like if it is Uber and the non technical founder was an expert in the limo business then actually then the non technical founder would be doing most of the work. Recruiting drivers and doing whatever else Uber has to do and the technical founder would be just writing the iPhone app which probably less, well iPhone and android app, which is less than half of it. If it’s purely a technical start up the non technical founder does sales and brings coffee and cheeseburgers to the programmer . Q: Do you see any value in business school for people who want to pursue entrepreneurship? A: Basically no, it sounds undiplomatic, but business school was designed to teach people management. Management is a problem that you only have in a startup if you are sufficiently successful. So really what you need to know early on to make a start up successful is developing products. You would be better off going to design school if you would want to go to some sort of school. Although frankly the way to learn how to do it is just to do it. One of the things I got wrong early on is that I advised people who were interested in starting a startup to go work for some other company for a few years before starting their own . Honestly the best way to learn on how to start a startup is just to just try to start it. You may not be successful but you will learn faster if you just do it. Business schools are trying really hard to do this. They were designed to train the officer core of large companies, which is what business seemed to be back when it was a choice to be either the officer core of large companies or Joe's Shoe Store. Then there was this new thing, Apple, that started as small as Joe's Shoe Store and turns into this giant mega company but they were not designed for that world they are good at what they’re good at. They should just do that and screw this whole entrepreneurship thing. Q: Management is a problem only if you are successful. What about those first two or three people? A: Ideally you are successful before you even hire two or three people. Ideally you don't even have two or three people for quite awhile. When you do the first hires in a startup they are almost like founders. They should be motivated by the same things, they can’t be people you have to manage. This is not like the office, these have to be your peers, you shouldn’t have to manage them much. Q: So is it just a big no no, someone has to be managed no way they should be on the founding team. A: In the case were you are doing something were you need some super advanced technical thing and there is some boffin that knows this thing and no one else in this world including on how to wipe his mouth. It may be to your advantage to hire said boffin and wipe his mouth for him. As a general rule you want people who are self motivated early on they should just be like founders. Q: Do you think we are currently in a bubble? A: I’ll give you two answers to this question. One, ask me questions that are useful to this audience because these people are here to learn how to start startups, and I have more data in my head than anybody else and you're asking me questions a reporter does because they cannot think of anything interesting to ask . I will answer your question. There is a difference between prices merely being high and a bubble. A bubble is a very specific form of prices being high where people knowingly pay high prices for something in the hope that they will be able to unload it later on some greater fool. That's what happened in the late 90's, when VC's knowingly invested in bullshit startups thinking that they would be able to take those things public and unload them on other retail investors before everything blew up I was there for that at the epicenter of it all. That is not what is happening today. Prices are high, valuations are high, but valuations being high does not mean a bubble. Every commodity has prices that go up and down in some sort of sine wave. Definitely prices are high. We tell people if you raise money, don't think the next time you raise money it’s going to be so easy, who knows maybe between now and then the Chinese economy will have exploded then there's a giant disaster recession. Assume the worst. But bubble? No. Q: I am seeing a trend among young people and successful entrepreneurs where they don’t want to start one great company but twenty. You are starting to see a rise in these labs attempts were they are going to try to launch a whole bunch of stuff, I don't have any stellar examples yet. A: Do you mean like IDEO? Q: No, like Idealab , Garrett Camp’s new one ... A: Oh yeah. There's this new thing were people start labs that are supposed to spin off startups. It might work, that's how Twitter started. In fact, I meant Idealab, not IDEO, that was another Freudian slip. Twitter was not Twitter at first. Twitter was a side project at a company called Odeo that was supposed to be in the podcasting business, and you like podcasting business, do those words even grammatically go together? The answer turned out to be no as Evan discovered. As a side project they spun off Twitter and boy was that a dog wagging tail, people are starting these things that are supposed to spin off startups, will it work? Quite possibly if the right people do it. You can't do it though, because you have to do it with your own money. Q: What advice do you have for female co-founders as they are pursuing funding? A: It probably is true that women have a harder time raising money. I have noticed this empirically and Jessica is just about to publish a bunch of interviews on female founders and a lot of them said that they thought they had a harder time raising money, too. Remember I said the way to raise money? Make your start up actually do well and that's just especially true in any case if you miss the ideal target from the VC's point of view in any respect. The way to solve that problem is make the startup do really well. In fact, there was a point a year or two ago when I tweeted this growth graph of this company and I didn't say who they were. I knew it would get people to start asking and it was actually a female founded startup that was having trouble raising money, but their growth graph was stupendous. So I tweeted it, knowing all these VC's would start asking me, “Who is that?” Growth graphs have no gender, so if they see the growth graph first, let them fall in love with that. Do well, which is generally good advice for all startups. Q: What would you learn in college right now? A: Literary theory, no just kidding. Honestly, I think I might try and study physics that’s the thing I feel I missed. For some reason, when I was a kid computers were the thing, maybe they still are. I got very excited learning to write code and you can write real programs in your bedroom. You can't build real accelerators, well maybe you can. Maybe physics, I noticed I sort of look longingly at physics so maybe. I don't know if that’s going to be helpful starting a startup and I just told you to follow your own curiosity so who cares if it's helpful, it'll turn out to be helpful. Q: What are your reoccurring systems in your work and personal life that make you efficient? A: Having kids is a good way to be efficient. Because you have no time left so if you want to get anything done, the amount of done you do per time is high. Actually many parents, start up founders who have kids have made that point explicitly. They cause you to focus because you have no choice. I wouldn't actually recommend having kids just to make you more focused. You know, I don't think I am very efficient, I have two ways of getting work done. One is during Y Combinator, the way I worked on Y Combinator is I was forced to. I had to set the application deadline, and then people would apply, and then there were all these applications that I had to respond to by a certain time. So I had to read them and I knew if I read them badly, we would get bad startups so I tried really hard to read them well. So I set up this situation that forced me to work. The other kind of work I do is writing essays. And I do that voluntarily, I am walking down the street and the essay starts writing itself in my head. I either force myself to work on less exciting things; I can't help working on exciting things. I don't have any useful techniques for making myself efficient. If you work on things you like, you don't have to force yourself to be efficient. Q: When is a good time to turn a side project into a startup? A: You will know, right. So the question is when you turn a side project into a startup, you will know that it is becoming a real startup when it takes over a alarming large percentage of your life, right. My god I've just spent all day working on this thing that’s supposed to be a side project, I am going to fail all of my classes what am I going to do, right. Then maybe it’s turning into a startup. Q: I know you talked a lot, earlier, about you'll know when your start up is doing extremely well, but I feel like in a lot of cases it's a gray line, where you have some users but not explosive growth that is up and to the right, what would you do or what would you recommend in those situations? Considering allocating time and resources, how do you balance? A: When a start up is growing but not much. Didn't you tell them they were supposed to read Do Things that Don't Scale? You sir have not done the readings, you are busted. Because there are four, I wrote a whole essay answered that question and that is to do things that don't scale. Just go read that, because I can't remember everything I said. It's about exactly that problem. Q: What kind of startup should not go through incubation, in your opinion? A: Definitely any that will fail. Or if you'll succeed but you're an intolerable person. That also Sam would probably sooner do without. Short of that, I cannot think of any, because a large percentage, founders are often surprised by how large a percentage of the problems that start ups have are the same regardless of what type of thing they're working on. And those tend to be kind of problems that YC helps the most not the ones that are domain specific. Can you think of the class of startups? That YC wouldn't work for? We had fission and fusion startups in the last batch. Q: You mentioned that it's good advice to learn a lot about something that matters, what are some good strategies to figure out what matters? A: If you think of technology as something that’s spreading as a sort of fractal stain. Anything on the edge represents an interesting idea, sounds familiar. Like I said that was the problem, you have correctly identified the thing I didn't really answer the question were I gave this question begging answer. I said I'm interested in interesting things and you said you were interested in interesting things, work on them and things will work out. How do you tell what is a real problem ? I don't know, that's like important enough to write a whole essay about. I don't know the answer and I probably should write something about that, but I don't know. I figured out a technique for detecting whether you have a taste for generally interesting problems. Which is whether you find working on boring things intolerable and there are known boring things. Like literary theory and working in middle management in some large company. So if you can tolerate those things, then you must have stupendous self-discipline or you don't have a taste for genially interesting problems and vice versa. Q: Do you like Snapchat? A: Snapchat? What do I know about Snapchat? We didn't fund them. I want another question. Q: If you hire people you like, you might get a monoculture and how do you deal with the blind spots that arise? A: Starting a startup is where many things will be going wrong. You can't expect it to be perfect. The advantage is of hiring people you know and like are far greater than the small disadvantage of having some monoculture. You look at it empirically, at all the most successful startups, someone just hires all their pals out of college. Alright you guys thank you. How to Format Lyrics: Type out all lyrics, even repeating song parts like the chorus Lyrics should be broken down into individual lines Use section headers above different song parts like [Verse], [Chorus], etc. Use italics ( <i>lyric</i> ) and bold ( <b>lyric</b> ) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part If you don’t understand a lyric, use [?] To learn more, check out our transcription guide or visit our transcribers forum Lecture 3 of How to Start a Startup : Counterintuitive Parts of Startups, and How to Have Ideas The recommended readings for lecture 3: Paul Graham — How to Get Ideas Transcript – Excerpt from Steve Jobs’s 1995 interview with Computerworld’s Oral History Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning 1. Lecture 1: How to Start a Startup 2. Lecture 2: Ideas, Products, Teams and Execution Part II 3. Lecture 3: Counterintuitive Parts of Startups, and How to Have Ideas 4. Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing 5. Lecture 5: Business Strategy and Monopoly Theory 6. Lecture 6: Growth 7. Lecture 7: How to Build Products Users Love, Part I 8. Lecture 8: Doing Things That Don’t Scale, PR, and How to Get Started 9. Lecture 9: How to Raise Money 10. Lecture 10: Company Culture and Building a Team, Part I 11. Lecture 11: Company Culture and Building a Team, Part II 12. Lecture 12: Sales and Marketing 13. Lecture 13: How To Be A Great Founder 14. Lecture 14: How to Operate 15. Lecture 15: How to Manage 16. Lecture 16: How to Run a User Interview 17. Lecture 17: How to Build Products Users Love, Part II 18. Lecture 18: Mechanics--Legal, Finance, HR, etc. 19. Lecture 19: Sales and Marketing, How to Pitch, and Investor Meeting Roleplaying 20. Lecture 20: Closing Thoughts and Later-Stage Advice Advice for Ambitious 19 Year Olds Do Things That Don’t Scale 1995 Interview with Computerworld’s Oral History Project Good and Bad Reasons to Become an Entrepreneur Genius is the world’s biggest collection of song lyrics and musical knowledge Get the Reddit app A community of like minded individuals that are looking to solve issues, network without spamming, talk about the growth of your business (Ride Along), challenges and high points and collab on projects together. Stay classy, no racism, humble and work hard. Catch Localcasestudy at Rohangilkes.com I read and summarized all of Paul Graham's 200+ essays Here's the summary on my site: https://www.jaakkoj.com/blog/graham It's over 10,000 words long, so I also made a Google Docs version, in case that's easier to navigate: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16fj-veqvD7pQBWhdnM6REHl4zIe75z3bec0HIzTEtWM/edit?usp=sharing It's all free - hope you find it useful! Paul Graham has had a big influence on me so I hope this introduction/summary inspires folks to read his essays. Let me know if there's something I can do to make the post more useful. #277 Paul Graham's Essays Part 3 Founders Entrepreneurship What I learned from reading Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age by Paul Graham Episode Website More Episodes 119 IMAGES Top Must-Read Paul Graham Essays Paul Graham's best essays Top Must-Read Paul Graham Essays Paul Graham Essays Our favorite Paul Graham Essays Paul Graham Essays VIDEO Paul Graham Themes in Essay Writing |Fatima Batool Important Essay Topics Paul Graham on Most Important Trait of Founders Paul Graham's Startup Success Advice 10 Important Modern Essays |BA Part 2|University of Gujrat COMMENTS Essays Ideas for Startups: What I Did this Summer: Inequality and Risk: After the Ladder: What Business Can Learn from Open Source: Hiring is Obsolete: The Submarine: Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas: Return of the Mac: Writing, Briefly: Undergraduation: A Unified Theory of VC Suckage: How to Start a Startup: What You'll Wish You'd Known: Made in USA ... Ideas for Startups Ideas get developed in the process of explaining them to the right kind of person. You need that resistance, just as a carver needs the resistance of the wood. This is one reason Y Combinator has a rule against investing in startups with only one founder. Practically every successful company has at least two. Paul Graham 101 A summary of Paul Graham's 200+ essays. This is an introduction to his ideas on startups, writing, society, decision-making and more. ... This has been nothing but a short introduction to Paul Graham's ideas. There are so many essays and ideas and topics that weren't included here, so, who knows, maybe at some point there will be a PG 201 Be Good So if doing good for people gives you a sense of mission that makes you harder to kill, that alone more than compensates for whatever you lose by not choosing a more selfish project. Help. Another advantage of being good is that it makes other people want to help you. This too seems to be an inborn trait in humans. PDF Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language Ideas for Startups by Paul Graham Page 1 of 8 Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. The article ... In an essay I wrote for high school students, I said a good rule of thumb was to stay upwind-- to work on things that maximize your future options. The principle applies for adults too, though Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas It means these ideas are invisible to most people who try to think of startup ideas, because their subconscious filters them out. Even the most ambitious people are probably best off approaching them obliquely. 1. A New Search Engine. The best ideas are just on the right side of impossible. The Top Idea in Your Mind The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly. [ 1] I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. 16 lessons from Paul Graham on starting a startup Lessons from Paul Graham's Essays. Build something people want, will use, and pay for. Create an easy way for people to pay you for it. Create something that "a small number of people want a large amount". The initial customer should initially be a single human, not an enterprise. While it may be an enterprise in the future, the first ... How to Get Startup Ideas November 2012. The 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. My Favorites List of Paul Graham's Essays. : r/ycombinator Hey Everyone, Hope you're doing well. I wanted to share my favorite essays of Paul Graham. I believe listening and reading advice from experienced people is a way of encoding success into your brain. In a sense, our brains let us code almost anything. Counterintuitively, reading does not seem like a part of this encoding because we forgot ... Paul Graham One guaranteed way to turn your mind into the type to start up ideas for them unconsciously. Is to get yourself to the leading edge of some technology. To, as Paul Buchheit put it, "Live in the ... Paul Graham Essays Paul Graham's essays are a collection of thought-provoking writings that span a broad spectrum of topics. He shares insights and wisdom on entrepreneurship, startups, programming, and life itself. I read and summarized all of Paul Graham's 200+ essays "Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another" - G.K. Chesterton Here we discuss The Great Books and other art forms, share best practices for pursuing a Classical Education and help others to understand the immense value of a traditional Liberal Arts education. A Student's Guide to Startups Most startups end up doing something different than they planned. The way the successful ones find something that works is by trying things that don't. So the worst thing you can do in a startup is to have a rigid, pre-ordained plan and then start spending a lot of money to implement it. Better to operate cheaply and give your ideas time to evolve. Essays by Paul Graham A student's guide to startups. Paul Graham. The pros and cons of starting a startup in (or soon after) college. Pros: stamina, poverty, rootlessness, colleagues, ignorance. Cons: building stuff that looks like class projects. Paul Graham Essays Novelty and Heresy. 43. The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius. 44. General and Surprising. 45. Charisma / Power. 46. The Risk of Discovery. Putting Ideas into Words Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course. You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience, writing is the stricter test. You have to commit to a single, optimal sequence of words. Less can go unsaid when you don't have tone of voice to carry meaning. And you can focus in a way that would seem excessive ... Startups in 13 Sentences 1. Pick good cofounders. Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. [ 1] And the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders. 2. Paul Graham AI Prompt: Write a brief essay in the style of Paul Graham on: This model does incur costs. Please limit to 2 essays so more users can participate. Optional: Temperature: Prompt Engineer: ___ Or generate a unique essay using the prompts below. Startup Ideas. Fundraising. #277 Paul Graham's Essays Part 3 What I learned from reading Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age by Paul Graham ‎Show Founders, Ep #277 Paul Graham's Essays Part 3 - Nov 16, 2022 Exit Writing, Briefly Writing, Briefly. March 2005. (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. Writing and Speaking 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 style. With speaking it's the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker. I first noticed this at a conference several years ago. assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis