Paul Graham Quotes

From a writer's point of view, Twitter is an app for the forced publication of early drafts.

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means.

So who should shoot for superlinear returns? Ambitious people of two types: those who know they're so good that they'll be net ahead in a world with higher variation, and those, particularly the young, who can afford to risk trying it to find out.

People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage — just a shorthand — for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

The standard to compare your software to is what it could be, not what your current competitors happen to have.

In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don’t understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.

Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.

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.

The three ingredients in clickbait revenue: a damning headline, a paywall, and a large number of people whose existing beliefs would be confirmed if the headline were accurate.

If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I'd take the first option. If I had children, it would arguably be immoral not to. It's absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty. If, as the evidence so far implies, you have to have one or the other in your society, take relative poverty.

why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

It's a mistake to treat investors' reasons for rejecting you as a guide to what you need to focus on, for three separate reasons: (a) much of the time they're lying, (b) when they're not, they're often mistaken, and (c) fundraising is not the primary goal anyway.

It's a good sign when you cautiously suggest some ridiculously ambitious future plan to a startup, and discover they've already thought a lot about it.

One of the most consistent mistakes I made when I was younger was to spend my time learning about things that other people thought were interesting — things that were cool or prestigious — instead of trusting my own curiosity.

Two ways for an AI company to protect itself from competition: (a) depend not just on AI but also deep domain knowledge about a particular field, (b) have a very close relationship with the end users.