Paul Graham Quotes

The way ro really do big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things

A startup sent me a revenue graph that grew steeply, then flattened. I asked why. Because they decided to focus on profitability, and had just achieved it. That's the right answer!

A painting is never finished. You just stop working on it.” This idea will be familiar to anyone who has worked on software.

I'm always relieved when some controversy has blown over by the time I hear about it.

If you make your app 10% easier to use you'll get twice as many users.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they’ll tend to become nerds.

Histories of 20th century art will be portraits of the time and place in which they were written.

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

Measurement and Leverage To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

Cancel culture had one upside: There are several people I followed after they got cancelled, to show support for them, and these have turned out to be some of the most interesting people I follow. Not surprisingly, since thinking for themselves was what got them cancelled.

Companies often wonder what to outsource and what not to. One possible answer: outsource any job that’s not directly exposed to competitive pressure, because outsourcing it will thereby expose it to competitive pressure. (I mean “outsource” in the sense of hiring another company to do it, not the more specific sense of hiring an overseas company.)

Twitter mobs are conformism storms.

Found in Johnson's dictionary:

Morkin: A wild beast, dead through sickness or mischance.

I just got an email from a founder about an idea that intrigued him but was "probably not a big company." I got excited when I read that. When a founder can't stop thinking about an idea despite it probably not being a big company, it could be a big company.

The power of established ideas is so great that even the most independent-minded people only rarely overcome it. The difference between independent-minded and conventional-minded people is that the former see past established ideas 1% of the time, and the latter 0%.