Paul Graham Quotes

Idea: Adversarial rendering. Builders proposing a new project should have to release enough of their design files for third parties to create renderings of what the project will actually look like.

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.

All you need to be sure of to start a startup is that you want to try it to see what it's like, that you're capable of working very hard, and that you know about something important that most other people don't.

As long as all newly founded startups prefer your product, don't worry about competitors who can convince larger customers. You'll own all future cohorts of companies, and that's more than enough. Plus in practice you'll eventually convert the old cohorts too, if you bother to.

Addiction is where you go from something taking you from normal to good to it taking you from bad to normal.

Believe it or not, it's usually wise to walk investors through the risks involved in your startup. Investors know there's risk. If there wasn't, your valuation would be billions of dollars right now. And if you're vague about the risks you seem glib, or worse still, clueless.

It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there’s more where that came from.

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.

Startups are not magic. They don’t change the laws of wealth creation. They just represent a point at the far end of the curve.

Twitter won't last forever. Nothing does. But whatever motivation ends up driving a successful "next Twitter," it's unlikely to be the fear that Elon will start allowing people to say heterodox things on the original Twitter.

College students use AI to do most of their writing. An increasing number of professors secretly use it for grading. In the limit case, AIs do all the work, and all the humans do is transmit what they create. A good compiler would recognize this as dead code and remove it.

I suspect one of the rarest skills is to have any sense whatsoever of how different things were in the past. I believe it's as rare as being able to solve hairy integrals, but we don't realize that because there are so few explicit tests of it.

If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

It doesn't feel laborious to go over every sentence in an essay 50 times. The mistakes in early drafts irritate me so much that it would be hard to stop trying to eliminate them.

Considering the degree to which conventional-minded people outnumber independent-minded ones, I feel fortunate to have published those two essays on the distinction between the two with as little blowback as I did.