Paul Graham Quotes

Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems likes the problem is important enough to build a company on.

It's not just because they're grumpy or nostalgic that old people complain when things decline. They're also the only first-hand witnesses — the only ones who saw how things were.

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.

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."

When I was a kid I was constantly being told to look at things from someone else’s point of view. What this always meant in practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what I wanted. This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a point of not cultivating it. Boy, was I wrong. It turns out that looking at things from other people’s point of view is practically the secret of success. Empathy doesn’t necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn’t imply that you’ll act in his interest; in some situations — in war, for example — you want to do exactly the opposite.

It's an unimpressive-sounding word, but one of the most powerful motivations is the motivation of the hobbyist. That's what keeps successful founders working on their companies long past the point when they've made enough to quit. It's their beloved project.

The third worry of the pointy-haired boss, the difficulty of hiring programmers, I think is a red herring. How many hackers do you need to hire, after all? Surely by now we all know that software is best developed by teams of less than ten people. And you shouldn’t have trouble hiring hackers on that scale for any language anyone has ever heard of. If you can’t find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software. In fact, choosing a more powerful language probably decreases the size of the team you need, because (a) if you use a more powerful language, you probably won’t need as many hackers, and (b) hackers who work in more advanced languages are likely to be smarter.

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.

You can go anywhere in books

I'm always looking for ways to add network effects to a startup's idea. Investors love those. But network effects are genuinely good to have. So any we come up with in order to feed to investors, they should probably go and make happen.

The reason ideological enforcers want to make you recant is not that they care what you believe. It's to demonstrate their power, and to show which beliefs are forbidden.

That's why forced recantations are public. If they cared what you believed, a private one would suffice.

If your startup's potential market is huge, make very conservative assumptions when estimating its size. There is nothing investors like more than an obviously conservative estimate that still ends up being huge.

We can't assume that if we had a single world government, the world would look like Europe and grow like America. More likely it would look like America and grow like Europe.

The only thing worse than having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI is not having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI.

What is technology? It’s technique. It’s the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it.