Paul Graham Quotes

People's irrational dislike of shipping charges seems so powerful that it would be worth thinking about what new things it could drive.

Good founders are remarkably similar across both generations and domains. E.g. Zuck and Bill Gates are way more like one another than they are like their contemporaries.

AI startups seem to grow faster than previous startups. But this is just the latest stage in a consistent trend over the last 50 years. Each decade's startups grow faster than the previous decade's.

The way to solve a politically charged problem is to ask what you'd do if it weren't politically charged, and then just do that.

Everything people can get away with using AI to write, they'll use AI to write.

Figuring out what a startup should say to investors is strangely useful for figuring out what it should actually do. Most people treat these questions as separate, but ideally they converge. If you can cook up a plausible plan to become huge, you should go ahead and do it.

In the US both the right and the left try to censor ideas they dislike. But their censorship takes place at opposite ends of the funnel: the right mainly wants to limit what can be taught to kids, while the left wants to limit what can be said at all.

How to catch someone who "writes" a book using ChatGPT. Say "In your book you wrote <quote that could have been in the book but wasn't>. What did you mean by that?" and see what they say.

You won't find a big overlap between discoverers and creators, and enforcers of rules. It's not just that discoverers and creators don't have the time to spare to enforce rules. They're different personality types.

If your startup's potential market is huge, make very conservative assumptions when estimating its size. There is nothing investors like more than an obviously conservative estimate that still ends up being huge.

The unusual thing about Nintendo is that they're good at both hardware and stories. It's very rare for a company to be good at two such different things, but powerful if you can pull it off.

When someone's audience derives mostly from complaining about some narrow set of problems, they have less incentive to fix them, or even acknowledge progress other people make toward fixing them.

It's a dangerous skill to be good at convincing yourself that you don't want things you worry you might not get. Useful in some areas perhaps, but disastrous in others.

Be careful about spreading the idea that adversity leads to success. It may, in some cases, but you want to be precise about which cases, and sure of your evidence. Otherwise you're implicitly telling parents to maltreat their kids.

When we do things that work, we rarely understand exactly why. We do them unconsciously, or because of tradition, or because we stumbled onto them. A lot of the value of essay writing is in figuring out why things that work do work.