Paul Graham Quotes

Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)

Seventeenth-century England was much like the third world today, in that government office was a recognized route to wealth. The great fortunes of that time still derived more from what we would now call corruption than from commerce.11 By the nineteenth century that had changed.

The biggest sleight of hand in essay writing is cramming tree-shaped ideas into linear form.

(Endnotes help a lot. They force those branches to be compressed, but the result can sometimes be pleasing in the same way gatehouses are.)

And you had better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to duplicate. Otherwise as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they’ll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they’ll take away your market overnight. You’d be like guerillas caught in the open field by regular army forces.

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.

If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.

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.

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.”
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“The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. That's where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and having the same people both design and implement the product. Microsoft themselves did this at the start. So did Apple. And Hewlett- Packard. I suspect almost every successful startup has.”
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“Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.”
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“The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible, as articulated as programming languages. Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.”
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“It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success.”
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“Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So to write good software you have to understand how little users understand. They're going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and it had better do what they guess it will, because they're not going to read the manual.

Medicines are very unusual among technologies in that faith in them preceded efficacy.

If you want to get someone famous to speak at your event, you're much more likely to get them to agree if it's a Q&A session rather than a talk. A talk = a week of worry for those who are not professional talkers (e.g. politicians), whereas a Q&A session you just show up for.

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

If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers.

As a rule the people who know the most about something are the pros whose incomes depend on doing it well. The pros at judging tech talent are venture capitalists. If venture capitalists' opinions differ from white nationalists', it's clear who's more likely to be right.

Almost thirty years in, online shopping is still not a solved problem. Big sites like Amazon work, but if you try to order from a manufacturer's site, there's still a good chance it will break. In a very high production value way, with lots of Javascript, but still break.