Paul Graham Quotes

Don't imitate qualities of your heroes at random. Some are flaws they succeeded despite. The qualities that are easiest to imitate are the most likely to be the flaws.

It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there’s more where that came from.

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.

If you want to start a startup, don't learn "entrepreneurship." Learn how to build things. The hard part of startups is not "entrepreneurship" but product: to know what to build, and to be able to build it.

Seek situations where you're judged solely by performance.

Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)

Any organization with a large, protected income will tend by default toward administrative bloat. It's the same in government, at Harvard, at Google. Unless you take explicit measures to avoid it, you'll overhire.

What made the Florentines rich in 1200 was the discovery of new techniques for making the high-tech product of the time, fine woven cloth. What made the Dutch rich in 1600 was the discovery of shipbuilding and navigation techniques that enabled them to dominate the seas of the Far East.

So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It’s hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it’s hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.

Architects know that some kinds of design problems are more personal than others. One of the cleanest, most abstract design problems is designing bridges. There your job is largely a matter of spanning a given distance with the least material. The other end of the spectrum is designing chairs. Chair designers have to spend their time thinking about human butts.

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.

The biggest opportunity for would-be startup founders is AI. But the most underpriced opportunity is probably non-AI ideas. So if you have a good non-AI idea, go for it, because everyone else is going to overlook it.

If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.

Instead of "I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that," we're going to get a long, vague, and conspicuously even-handed discourse about the factors involved in the design and use of pod bay doors.

It annoys me when teachers require kids to use laborious, prescribed methods to calculate things (and to "show their work" to prove they did) because it teaches kids not to see the patterns that exist in the numbers.