Paul Graham Quotes

Professors teaching literature would rather be producing it. Professors teaching math are producing it.

It seems so much more civilized when you arrive in America from Europe, and bottle caps just come right off. That regulation was a big mistake. It's as if the bureaucrats were seeking out something with a high ratio of annoyance to impact.

Unless you're a lawyer or a lexicographer, in a good faith conversation with someone smart, you rarely have to talk about the meanings of the words you're using. So if you have to, it's a sign that you're talking to someone stupid or intellectually dishonest.

You are far more dangerous to your startup than competitors are. A hundred times more startups die from poor execution by their founders than are killed by competitors.

We can't assume that if we had a single world government, the world would look like Europe and grow like America. More likely it would look like America and grow like Europe.

I suspect one of the rarest skills is to have any sense whatsoever of how different things were in the past. I believe it's as rare as being able to solve hairy integrals, but we don't realize that because there are so few explicit tests of it.

If you want to get someone famous to speak at your event, you're much more likely to get them to agree if it's a Q&A session rather than a talk. A talk = a week of worry for those who are not professional talkers (e.g. politicians), whereas a Q&A session you just show up for.

The fear that you won't get something sometimes makes you lie to yourself about whether you want it. To counteract this, ask yourself: If I already had it, would I be glad?

For better or worse, the basis of popular culture now seems to be user-generated content like memes and videos. When I was a kid it was TV. That's a big change, from maximally centralized to maximally decentralized.

The size of a company, in revenues, is distinct from its profit margin. The latter determines whether it could pay its workers more. So "Surely a huge company like Megacorp could afford to pay its workers more" is fallacious reasoning.

Almost thirty years in, online shopping is still not a solved problem. Big sites like Amazon work, but if you try to order from a manufacturer's site, there's still a good chance it will break. In a very high production value way, with lots of Javascript, but still break.

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.

When mechanical watches became obsolete around 1970 they represented almost exactly 700 years of refinement by some of the best minds of their time. That is a really long run.

The reason some teenagers automatically reject everything their parents want them to do is because they lack confidence. In some people this persists into adulthood, but with parents replaced by government.

More accountability isn't always better. In fact, the better an organization is, the more measuring their performance decreases it.