Paul Graham Quotes

You might find contradictory taboos. In one culture it might seem shocking to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. But I think usually the shock is on one side. In one culture x is ok, and in another it’s considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that’s shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one.

There are now so many "accelerators" that I get spam from people making products for them. Very weird. I wrote all YC's original software, so every spam is either offering something I wrote, or something I didn't think was worth writing.

Even the best startups often go through near-death experiences. The problem with venture debt is that it tends to turn near-death experiences into death experiences. Avoid it if you can.

Prediction: Remote work will become so fashionable that even companies that don't get it will try to embrace it, leading to a bimodal distribution of outcomes.

This bimodal distribution will be the same we've seen over and over already: tech cos will win.

For the foreseeable future, everything about starting a startup, both good and bad, will be accentuated. It will be even harder to figure out what to do, but the founders who get it right will be able to create amazing things even faster than they could before.

The problem with working slowly is not just that technical innovation happens slowly. It’s that it tends not to happen at all. It’s only when you’re deliberately looking for hard problems, as a way to use speed to the greatest advantage, that you take on this kind of project. Developing new technology is a pain in the ass. It is, as Edison said, one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Without the incentive of wealth, no one wants to do it.

Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing. You have to do your homework. But as you become expert in a field, you’ll start to hear little voices saying, What a hack! There must be a better way. Don’t ignore those voices. Cultivate them. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

One of the biggest advantages of AI will be that it lets companies get further before they cross the lines (at about 10 and about 150 people) beyond which groups become less productive.

You won't find a big overlap between discoverers and creators, and enforcers of rules. It's not just that discoverers and creators don't have the time to spare to enforce rules. They're different personality types.

Architects know that some kinds of design problems are more personal than others. One of the cleanest, most abstract design problems is designing bridges. There your job is largely a matter of spanning a given distance with the least material. The other end of the spectrum is designing chairs. Chair designers have to spend their time thinking about human butts.

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.

The most important component of writing clearly is simply to have high standards for clarity. Then if you write something unclear, you notice, and ask: what did I mean to say? You can just keep doing this over and over. And if you have high standards for clarity, you will.

I've never met a more consistently Darwinian group of people than nature guides. Supposedly rapacious business types are pollyannas by comparison.

The more you realize that most judgements are greatly influenced by random, extraneous factors—that most people judging you are more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise and perceptive magistrate—the more you realize you can do things to influence the outcome.

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.