Paul Graham Quotes

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can’t make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else. How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can’t get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them.

For better or worse, the basis of popular culture now seems to be user-generated content like memes and videos. When I was a kid it was TV. That's a big change, from maximally centralized to maximally decentralized.

Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.

why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

Trying to think of startup ideas doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.

1. Don't design your site to force visitors to consume information in a particular order unless you're sure this is what all visitors want.

2. You can't be sure what visitors want.

But it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich. In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called “corruption”) when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.

Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users.

AI startups seem to grow faster than previous startups. But this is just the latest stage in a consistent trend over the last 50 years. Each decade's startups grow faster than the previous decade's.

I used to think <person> was smart. Then I discovered that he disagrees with me about <political issue>, and I realized he couldn't be, because no one who disagrees with me about <political issue> could be smart.

Something I just told a founder: Stay as small as you can for as long as you can. People who come to visit your office should always be surprised that such an important company has so few employees.

One of the things that surprised me about YC is how long we continue to advise founders. We thought we'd just help them get started and then hand them over to later stage investors, but in fact we're still talking to founders 10 years in.

I'm always looking for ways to add network effects to a startup's idea. Investors love those. But network effects are genuinely good to have. So any we come up with in order to feed to investors, they should probably go and make happen.

The power of established ideas is so great that even the most independent-minded people only rarely overcome it. The difference between independent-minded and conventional-minded people is that the former see past established ideas 1% of the time, and the latter 0%.

the probability of being able to "beat the system" increases when the system is inconsistent or corrupt.