Paul Graham Quotes

If you want to ensure that something you're writing has a sufficiently neutral point of view, imagine that you're an alien from another planet writing a report to your supervisors. But an alien with a sense of humor.

If your startup's potential market is huge, make very conservative assumptions when estimating its size. There is nothing investors like more than an obviously conservative estimate that still ends up being huge.

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means.

I just got an email from a founder about an idea that intrigued him but was "probably not a big company." I got excited when I read that. When a founder can't stop thinking about an idea despite it probably not being a big company, it could be a big company.

Some of the most successful founders start out tentative and lukewarm. Especially the young ones, who are often far from certain they want to run a startup. As they should be, because it's not for everyone, and they don't know yet what they like.

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.

It's strange that student debt is higher than ever at the same time that educating oneself is easier than ever.

Trying to make founders describe their products in simple everyday language is like trying to push together the north poles of two magnets.

Quote may seem a bit of a foreign concept, because few other languages have anything like it. It's closely tied to one of the most distinctive features of Lisp: code and data are made out of the same data structures, and the quote operator is the way we distinguish between them.

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead- end a Neanderthal language.

Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter.

Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight.

The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

Don't join a company or industry that has contempt for its customers. You can make a lot of money that way, and of course it gives you a feeling of superiority, but you'll never do great work for a market you despise.