Paul Graham Quotes

Since ideologues get their opinions in bulk, they assume everyone else does too, and thus that anyone who disagrees with one of their opinions must disagree with all of them.

People often email me with big-sounding ideas (reinvent commerce, change the way people meet, transform scientific research), and the bigger the idea sounds, the less interested I am. Truly big ideas don't sound big initially.

Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.

Pretentiousness seems a specifically juvenile flaw. I expect to find it in high school and college kids, but I'm surprised to find it in adults. I think the reason is that experience beats it out of you.

Worrying that your startup will be eaten by the model companies is like worrying that your life will be constrained after you become a movie star. You're far more likely simply to fail.

One of the most interesting (and also frightening) things about AI is how difficult it is to predict what will happen. My kids ask me what's going to happen, and all I can say is that there will be huge changes, and I can't predict what they'll be.

hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers. What else can painting teach us about hacking?

The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add.

The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.

More accountability isn't always better. In fact, the better an organization is, the more measuring their performance decreases it.

That averaging gets to be a problem. I think the single biggest problem afflicting large companies is the difficulty of assigning a value to each person’s work.

Disappointed to learn that AUROC has nothing to do with aurochs.

Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.

Prediction: Remote work will become so fashionable that even companies that don't get it will try to embrace it, leading to a bimodal distribution of outcomes.

This bimodal distribution will be the same we've seen over and over already: tech cos will win.

You are far more dangerous to your startup than competitors are. A hundred times more startups die from poor execution by their founders than are killed by competitors.