Paul Graham Quotes

No investor has any right to push you to get acquired if you don't want to. The company is your project, not theirs.

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.

You can’t trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they’re satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.

If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.

One good thing about habitually taking super long to write things is that you don't slow down noticeably as you age.

It's a fallacy to think you should drop out of college because you have an idea that has to be implemented right now, or it will be too late. If you stay in school you'll have other and better ideas.

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead- end a Neanderthal language.

The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner,

If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.

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.

It's a superpower to be interested in important things that most other people find boring. They'll do them out of duty, if they do them at all. So if you do them out of genuine interest, you'll get a lot further.

Some of the most successful founders start out tentative and lukewarm. Especially the young ones, who are often far from certain they want to run a startup. As they should be, because it's not for everyone, and they don't know yet what they like.

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.

Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need.

If showing movies in theaters wasn't Hollywood's original business model, it would seem a pretty niche idea. Pay to watch a movie at a set time in a big room with a bunch of other people? Someone proposing this would have a hard time getting studios to take the idea seriously.