Paul Graham Quotes

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.

Two ways for an AI company to protect itself from competition: (a) depend not just on AI but also deep domain knowledge about a particular field, (b) have a very close relationship with the end users.

There is nothing more powerful than well-informed optimism. It has to be well-informed though. The "everything will be fine" type of optimism may also be somewhat useful, but it's not as useful as the "Hmm, what if we tried x?" kind.

So who should shoot for superlinear returns? Ambitious people of two types: those who know they're so good that they'll be net ahead in a world with higher variation, and those, particularly the young, who can afford to risk trying it to find out.

One of the more subtle pitfalls of starting a startup when you're too young is that you can't hire well, because you haven't had enough experience to be a good judge of people. You can judge technical ability but not character, so you end up hiring smart jerks.

Garry Tan is a moral canary in a coal mine. When people hate on Garry Tan, they out themselves as either evil or stupid, because in fact Garry is as close to a 100% good guy as you get.

If your world has lots of early adopters, you'll have lots of startups making things for you, and if it doesn't, you won't.

When someone's audience derives mostly from complaining about some narrow set of problems, they have less incentive to fix them, or even acknowledge progress other people make toward fixing them.

Data is ideology's headwind.

The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

think language designers would do better to consider their target user to be a genius who will need to do things they never anticipated, rather than a bumbler who needs to be protected from himself. The bumbler will shoot himself in the foot anyway.

It's not a sufficient defense of activism to claim that it "increases awareness" of a problem. There are forms of activism that increase awareness and yet set back efforts to solve the problem.

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.

Sometimes people who discover a new kind of work know that they have. Other times they just do something so well that imitating them becomes a genre.

if you show up at college and find that you're behind the kids who went to better high schools, don't be discouraged. Your position may be worse, but your velocity is higher. By the end of college you'll be ahead of them.