Paul Graham Quotes

Helping students come up with good startup ideas is like hooking them up to the deck catapult of an aircraft carrier. If you succeed, they're gone. What are they supposed to do, not work on the idea? And working on a startup is incompatible with being a student.

Everything people can get away with using AI to write, they'll use AI to write.

With ambition, you tend to get one step below what you aim for. So unless you try to be the best, you won't even be good.

Unless you're a lawyer or a lexicographer, in a good faith conversation with someone smart, you rarely have to talk about the meanings of the words you're using. So if you have to, it's a sign that you're talking to someone stupid or intellectually dishonest.

LinkedIn was already slop. All that's changed is that it's now AI slop.

Nearly all makers have day jobs early in their careers.

Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter.

Figuring out what a startup should say to investors is strangely useful for figuring out what it should actually do. Most people treat these questions as separate, but ideally they converge. If you can cook up a plausible plan to become huge, you should go ahead and do 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.

In office hours with startups I often try to figure out a secret weapon they can use to protect themselves from competitors. Today to my delight I talked to one whose most natural secret weapon was to be genuinely benevolent.

This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

For the foreseeable future, everything about starting a startup, both good and bad, will be accentuated. It will be even harder to figure out what to do, but the founders who get it right will be able to create amazing things even faster than they could before.

The first type of judgement is the type where judging you is the end goal... But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else.

Part of what software has to do is explain itself.

Competition can be an effective motivator, but don't let it choose the problem for you. Don't let yourself get drawn into chasing something merely because there's a lot of competition for it.