Paul Graham Quotes

Err on the side of verbs. If you have to choose between expressing something via the verb or in some other way, choose the verb.

The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery.

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.

So if you can make something that appeals to people today and would also have appealed to people in 1500, there is a good chance it will appeal to people in 2500.

The test of character is how you treat the powerless.

In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can’t do what all the other startups do.

Organizations that can't measure performance end up measuring performativeness instead.

A startup's ascent often consists of alternating rises and flat spots. This puzzled me when I first saw it at Viaweb. But it turns out just to be what happens when you add a function representing "random ups and downs" to one that's consistently increasing.

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.

It could actually be a significant problem that Europe doesn't have enough garages. This sounds like a joke, but I'm serious. Garages let you work on stuff that doesn't matter yet, which is how big things often start. The outliers of ideas need the outliers of space.

College students mostly think what their teachers tell them to.

... if you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.

looking at things from other people’s point of view is practically the secret of success.

People's irrational dislike of shipping charges seems so powerful that it would be worth thinking about what new things it could drive.

The users who complain about the flaws in your product may seem annoying, but they are on the whole probably your most valuable users. They complain because they care, and I doubt a startup could ever get really big without users who care a lot about the product.