Paul Graham Quotes

It could actually be a significant problem that Europe doesn't have enough garages. This sounds like a joke, but I'm serious. Garages let you work on stuff that doesn't matter yet, which is how big things often start. The outliers of ideas need the outliers of space.

If you invested at the peak of the Nasdaq in March 2000, it would have been roughly 18 years before you were whole again: 15 years before the index reached the same point, plus another 3 for inflation.

It may be a mistake to ask which occupations are most safe from being taken by AI. What AI (in its current form) is good at is not so much certain jobs, but a certain way of working. It's good at scutwork. So that's the thing to avoid.

Worrying that your startup will be eaten by the model companies is like worrying that your life will be constrained after you become a movie star. You're far more likely simply to fail.

The harder the task, the less you care about people's race or sex or whatever, either in the racist sense or the diversity sense. You're so desperate simply to find anyone who can do it well that you don't think about anything else.

As a rule the people who know the most about something are the pros whose incomes depend on doing it well. The pros at judging tech talent are venture capitalists. If venture capitalists' opinions differ from white nationalists', it's clear who's more likely to be right.

People often email me with big-sounding ideas (reinvent commerce, change the way people meet, transform scientific research), and the bigger the idea sounds, the less interested I am. Truly big ideas don't sound big initially.

You still occasionally hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be rich, because their employees created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees.

Something that's obvious in retrospect but I only noticed after years as a primary school parent: kids who are bullies or assholes tend to have parents who are too, and this often makes it hard for the administrators to keep a lid on bad behavior.

Two ways for an AI company to protect itself from competition: (a) depend not just on AI but also deep domain knowledge about a particular field, (b) have a very close relationship with the end users.

The scary thing about the speed at which AI is evolving is that it isn't yet mainly evolving itself. The current rate of progress is still driven mainly by improvements in hardware and in code written by human programmers.

If you're running a startup, sell to startups if you can. They don't have as much money, but they decide quickly, and even more importantly, they have a better influence on your product.

One of Y Combinator's most important traditions is conciseness. There is so much vague blather in business. It wastes people's time and, worse still, is a sign of unclear thinking.

Any organization with a large, protected income will tend by default toward administrative bloat. It's the same in government, at Harvard, at Google. Unless you take explicit measures to avoid it, you'll overhire.

Winners tend to underestimate the role of luck in outcomes, and losers to overestimate it. So all other things being equal, someone who is always talking about luck is probably a loser.