Paul Graham Quotes

Pretentiousness seems a specifically juvenile flaw. I expect to find it in high school and college kids, but I'm surprised to find it in adults. I think the reason is that experience beats it out of you.

If your world has lots of early adopters, you'll have lots of startups making things for you, and if it doesn't, you won't.

One of the best presents you can get for a cook is a new spice they didn't know about. You're not just buying them the spice, but the knowledge that it exists, and what it's like.

It's not a sufficient defense of activism to claim that it "increases awareness" of a problem. There are forms of activism that increase awareness and yet set back efforts to solve the problem.

The value of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is not just that it prevents you from messing up things that are going well, but that it also causes you to focus instead on fixing the things that are real problems.

The press writes about startups as if there were already too many of them. But there's internal evidence showing how far from saturated this domain is: the time between when an idea becomes possible, and when it's realized. This can still sometimes be years.

Trying to make founders describe their products in simple everyday language is like trying to push together the north poles of two magnets.

When something is described as "academically challenging," that's good. That means you learn a lot.

If people lived forever they'd accumulate infinitely many injuries.

It's a rough combination when people are simultaneously overreaching and uninformed. They want the best of everything, but they don't know what the best is, so their demands are simultaneously strident and random, like a set of vectors with large magnitudes and random directions.

Ideology makes you doubly likely to be mistaken. You not only receive your beliefs as a matching set, which makes it extremely unlikely that they're all correct; you also can't change any of them, or you'll seem a backslider to your peers.

You can sometimes learn as much from things done badly as things done well. Sometimes it only becomes clear what's needed when it's missing.

If the objection being made to a piece of general advice is that it's not for everyone, then it's probably pretty good. No advice is for everyone, so that's just the background radiation of objections.

if you show up at college and find that you're behind the kids who went to better high schools, don't be discouraged. Your position may be worse, but your velocity is higher. By the end of college you'll be ahead of them.

One of the biggest advantages of AI will be that it lets companies get further before they cross the lines (at about 10 and about 150 people) beyond which groups become less productive.