Paul Graham Quotes

The easiest people to trick are those who want to believe something false.

The third worry of the pointy-haired boss, the difficulty of hiring programmers, I think is a red herring. How many hackers do you need to hire, after all? Surely by now we all know that software is best developed by teams of less than ten people. And you shouldn’t have trouble hiring hackers on that scale for any language anyone has ever heard of. If you can’t find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software. In fact, choosing a more powerful language probably decreases the size of the team you need, because (a) if you use a more powerful language, you probably won’t need as many hackers, and (b) hackers who work in more advanced languages are likely to be smarter.

Your moral principles and your economic interests won't always be aligned. What you do when they're not is a test of character.

Technology = Leverage Startups offer anyone a way to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. They allow measurement because they’re small, and they offer leverage because they make money by inventing new technology.

Someone asked how to expand startups' ideas. The best way is to shrink the idea down to its essence, then ask how broadly that essential idea could be expanded. You have to shrink it first, though, or there will be random stuff left in it that impedes its expansion.

Steve Jobs saved a company that was in a terminal decline. And not merely in the way a turnaround specialist does, by cutting costs; he had to decide what Apple’s next products should be. Few others could have done it.

In practice, good intentions rarely work as well as good incentives.

wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALS and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison.

Trying to make something timeless is like thinking about follow-through when kicking a football. In theory it shouldn't matter what happens to your foot after the ball leaves it. But in practice thinking about where your foot will be later makes you put it in the right place now.

If we ever undertake multi-generation trips to distant stars, the initial crew will be optimistic enthusiasts, but their grandchildren will have reverted to the mean and will curse their grandparents for consigning them to live and die aboard a spaceship.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

don't feel like you're doomed to fail if you're not sure on day 1 that you want to be running a public company. Not being sure of that is if anything a sign of sanity.

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.

People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you’ll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don’t just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it’s really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That’s the way the government does things. They do something really big that’s really bad, and they think, Well, we’ll make it better, and then it never gets better”.

Building Fast Companies for Growth, Inc. September 2013

I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end — a Neanderthal language. I predict a similar fate for Java. People sometimes send me mail saying, “How can you say that Java won’t turn out to be a successful language? It’s already a successful language.” And I admit that it is, if you measure success by shelf space taken up by books on it, or by the number of undergrads who believe they have to learn it to get a job. When I say Java won’t turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol.