Paul Graham Quotes

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.)

Something I taught 11 yo: The less competent the judges in a contest, the less it matters to win it.

In practice I think it’s easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty.

Now we think of the middle class as people who are neither rich nor poor, but originally they were a distinct group. In a feudal society, there are just two classes: a warrior aristocracy, and the serfs who work their estates. The middle class were a new, third group who lived in towns and supported themselves by manufacturing and trade.

In both cases, what it all comes down to is users. You’d think that a company about to buy you would do a lot of research and decide for themselves how valuable your technology was. Not at all. What they go by is the number of users you have.

Once you cross the threshold of profitability, however low, your runway becomes infinite.

Trying to think of startup ideas doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.

It’s hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars?

If we were talking about Europe in 1000, or most of the third world today, the standard misquotation would be spot on.

If you start a startup, don’t design your product to please VCs or potential acquirers. Design your product to please the users. If you win the users, everything else will follow.

In hacking, like painting, work comes in cycles. Sometimes you get excited about a new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it. Other times nothing seems interesting.

Number 1, languages vary in power. Number 2, most managers deliberately ignore this. Between them, these two facts are literally a recipe for making money. ITA is an example of this recipe in action. If you want to win in a software business, just take on the hardest problem you can find, use the most powerful language you can get, and wait for your competitors’ pointy-haired bosses to revert to the mean.

The way ro really do big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things

Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, petty nobles and former serfs banded together in towns that gradually became powerful enough to ignore the local feudal lords.10 Like serfs, the middle class made a living largely by creating wealth. (In port cities like Genoa and Pisa, they also engaged in piracy.) But unlike serfs they had an incentive to create a lot of it. Any wealth a serf created belonged to his master. There was not much point in making more than you could hide. Whereas the independence of the townsmen allowed them to keep whatever wealth they created.

What is technology? It’s technique. It’s the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it.