Paul Graham Quotes

Consulting is where product companies go to die.

Everything people can get away with using AI to write, they'll use AI to write.

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design. If you don’t know where your ideas are coming from, you’re probably imitating an imitator.

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.

Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.

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.

it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich.

Experienced and inexperienced investors both lead you on, but for different reasons. Inexperienced ones get excited, then get cold feet, and the result is as if they were leading you on. Whereas experienced but unscrupulous investors deliberately act more excited than they are.

Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.

Most vicious circles can be made to run in reverse.

When those far removed from the creation of wealth -- undergraduates, reporters, politicians -- hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

The reason AI coding works so well is that the source code of the median app was already slop before LLMs.

Wokeness isn't why the Democrats lost the election. But it is why they're too weak now to oppose Trump. They don't know what they stand for.

When we do things that work, we rarely understand exactly why. We do them unconsciously, or because of tradition, or because we stumbled onto them. A lot of the value of essay writing is in figuring out why things that work do work.