Paul Graham Quotes

You have to be able to see things from the user’s point of view.

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.

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.

"Make something people want" is fundamentally advice about being empirical, instead of assuming you already have all the answers. The equivalent for investors would be "Let founders teach you what people want."

Don't take money from an investor you have moral qualms about because of valuable connections they claim to have. Being upstanding matters more in the long term than connections.

Good design looks easy. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion.

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.

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

Keep your identity small.

In reality, wealth is measured by what one delivers, not how much effort it costs. If I paint someone’s house, the owner shouldn’t pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.

I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you’re designing
something for idiots, odds are you’re not designing something good, even for idiots.