Paul Graham Quotes

Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.

If the far left are upset that having advanced math classes in public schools produces unequal outcomes, wait till they see how unequal the outcomes are without such classes.

As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live.

Trying to make something timeless is like thinking about follow-through when kicking a football. In theory it shouldn't matter what happens to your foot after the ball leaves it. But in practice thinking about where your foot will be later makes you put it in the right place now.

One difficulty when trying to ban ideas on social networks is that it's the edge cases that matter most, but bans are enforced by low-level employees who don't understand them.

Why are the far left politicians who attacked founders for their "greed" when rising stock prices increased their net worth, as if they'd taken that money from everyone else, not commending them for their generosity now that falling stock prices have decreased their net worth?

If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.

Reading history books can be useful, but the best thing is to read old books.

A lot of the statements that got people in trouble seem harmless now.

It’s obvious that biotech or software startups exist to solve hard technical problems, but I think it will also be found to be true in businesses that don’t seem to be about technology. McDonald’s, for example, grew big by designing a system, the McDonald’s franchise, that could then be reproduced at will all over the face of the earth. A McDonald’s franchise is controlled by rules so precise that it is practically a piece of software. Write once, run everywhere. Ditto for Wal-Mart. Sam Walton got rich not by being a retailer, but by designing a new kind of store.

There are now so many "accelerators" that I get spam from people making products for them. Very weird. I wrote all YC's original software, so every spam is either offering something I wrote, or something I didn't think was worth writing.

If you're criticizing a good writer and the sentence you use to describe what they said is more unequivocal than the one they wrote, you've probably misinterpreted them, because a good writer says things as unequivocally as possible.

Startups are not magic. They don’t change the laws of wealth creation. They just represent a point at the far end of the curve.

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.

When I talk to more established startups, one of the first things I want to know, after asking about the growth rate and whether they're profitable, is whether the founders still have board control. I'm more optimistic about the company when the answer is yes.