Paul Graham Quotes

You can't accurately call something a milestone when the more impressive alternative would be not to hit it.

When startups are doing well it's common for them either not to disclose their numbers, or under-report them. Half the time when I get an email with great numbers, it's followed by "but don't tell anyone."

If you're in high school and you want to start a startup one day, you might think the best thing to do now is to start startups. But it probably isn't.

LinkedIn was already slop. All that's changed is that it's now AI slop.

Technology = Leverage Startups offer anyone a way to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. They allow measurement because they’re small, and they offer leverage because they make money by inventing new technology.

The value of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is not just that it prevents you from messing up things that are going well, but that it also causes you to focus instead on fixing the things that are real problems.

European public opinion will apparently tolerate people being fired in industries where they really care about performance. Unfortunately the only industry they care enough about so far is soccer.

When I finished the first draft of an essay in high school, I'd scan through it hoping it was long enough. Now when I finish a first draft I scroll through it hoping it's not too long.

Quote may seem a bit of a foreign concept, because few other languages have anything like it. It's closely tied to one of the most distinctive features of Lisp: code and data are made out of the same data structures, and the quote operator is the way we distinguish between them.

and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don’t actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.

If language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn’t, that probably doesn’t make A more powerful, because you can probably write a subroutine to do it in B. But if A supports, say, recursion, and B doesn’t, that’s not likely to be something you can fix by writing library functions.

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.

It may seem unlikely in principle that one individual could really generate so much more wealth than another. The key to this mystery is to revisit that question, are they really worth 100 of us? Would a basketball team trade one of their players for 100 random people? What would Apple’s next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people?6 These things don’t scale linearly. Perhaps the CEO or the professional athlete has only ten times (whatever that means) the skill and determination of an ordinary person. But it makes all the difference that it’s concentrated in one individual.

The holidays are the best time for working. Everyone who usually interrupts you isn't.