Paul Graham Quotes

Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.

Hypothesis: One way to tell whether someone's a "natural" at something is when they do it with style even when they're first learning and don't know much yet.

Who thinks they’re not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she’s open-minded. Hasn’t she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they’ll say the same thing: they’re pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid “wrong” as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like “negative” or “destructive”.)

When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don’t know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite.

The reason AI coding works so well is that the source code of the median app was already slop before LLMs.

Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

All you need to be sure of to start a startup is that you want to try it to see what it's like, that you're capable of working very hard, and that you know about something important that most other people don't.

I suppose designating "sectors of focus" for your VC firm could be harmless, so long as it's only something you tell LPs and not something you start to believe yourself.

There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend.

When something is fundamentally bogus, it ends up being surrounded by a cloud of subsidiary bogus things. It's like the way you can prove any proposition if you start with contradictory premises.

Addiction is where you go from something taking you from normal to good to it taking you from bad to normal.

So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It’s hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it’s hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.

The way to solve a politically charged problem is to ask what you'd do if it weren't politically charged, and then just do that.

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.

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.

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.