Paul Graham Quotes

If you're a hot startup, investors will offer you money on terms so good it would seem crazy to refuse. And yet it will often be the right thing to. Not because of the dilution, but because raising too much will make your company slack and bloated.

In many domains it's an advantage to have a culture of doing things fast and cheaply. But organizations never shift toward this as they age; if they shift, it's always in the other direction. So the only way to have this culture is to start with it and not lose it.

Twitter won't last forever. Nothing does. But whatever motivation ends up driving a successful "next Twitter," it's unlikely to be the fear that Elon will start allowing people to say heterodox things on the original Twitter.

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.

There is nothing more powerful than well-informed optimism. It has to be well-informed though. The "everything will be fine" type of optimism may also be somewhat useful, but it's not as useful as the "Hmm, what if we tried x?" kind.

The power of established ideas is so great that even the most independent-minded people only rarely overcome it. The difference between independent-minded and conventional-minded people is that the former see past established ideas 1% of the time, and the latter 0%.

It's not just because they're grumpy or nostalgic that old people complain when things decline. They're also the only first-hand witnesses — the only ones who saw how things were.

The pitch of populist demagogues is always "The country is going to hell, and only I can save it." So one of the best ways to undermine them is to publish evidence that things are getting better, not worse.

Since ideologues get their opinions in bulk, they assume everyone else does too, and thus that anyone who disagrees with one of their opinions must disagree with all of them.

OH: "With old friends you can put up with some amount of crazy, but no one wants to make new, crazy friends."

It's a novel thing, and not in a good way, to hear the US government sounding like the dictators we used to ridicule in past decades. This is a decline that transcends the battle between left and right. No previous administration has sounded like this.

Language policing is so creepy. You can tell the people who do it aren't real writers, or they could never produce the horrible rules they come up with. It's like priests telling people how to have sex.

It's a mistake for startups to treat fundraises as a series of milestones. There's something even more impressive than raising a series whatever: to be making so much that you don't need to. Eventually all companies have to reach this point. The sooner you do, the better.

If the key to becoming a billionaire is to exploit people, as some politicians claim, we at YC are idiots. We've spent the last 20 years choosing the wrong founders and teaching them the wrong things. Or maybe we do actually understand startups, and the politicians are wrong.

Hypothesis: One way to tell whether someone's a "natural" at something is when they do it with style even when they're first learning and don't know much yet.