Paul Graham Quotes

English-American programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

Paul Graham (born 1964) is an English computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), cofounding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.

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Trump's bullying only works (and only temporarily at that) because he's taking advantage of the high-trust customs and relationships established by more principled predecessors.

Work on startup ideas that require you to be the way you already are. Then what would in ordinary life be a mere idiosyncrasy can become a unique advantage.

Instead of "I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that," we're going to get a long, vague, and conspicuously even-handed discourse about the factors involved in the design and use of pod bay doors.

Something I taught the boys on the way to school: one thing the story of the German concentration camps teaches us is how much potential for evil there is in so many apparently normal people.

There are two ways to be stupid: plain lack of brainpower, and ideology. The two are far from mutually exclusive though. If you're not intelligent enough, you're more likely to allow in an ideology that drags you even further down.

One of the most interesting (and also frightening) things about AI is how difficult it is to predict what will happen. My kids ask me what's going to happen, and all I can say is that there will be huge changes, and I can't predict what they'll be.

The success of Apple's new microprocessors (combined with Intel's failure) has upset a lot of people's predictions. It's pretty impressive for an established company to throw everyone a curve ball on that scale.

Showing up at YC is the exact opposite of having a teenager. I walk in and I'm mobbed by people eager to hear my advice about what they should do.

I just got an email from a founder about an idea that intrigued him but was "probably not a big company." I got excited when I read that. When a founder can't stop thinking about an idea despite it probably not being a big company, it could be a big company.

If we ever undertake multi-generation trips to distant stars, the initial crew will be optimistic enthusiasts, but their grandchildren will have reverted to the mean and will curse their grandparents for consigning them to live and die aboard a spaceship.

Expressing yourself well compounds. You don't just understand your current ideas better. You're also more likely to have the new ideas that follow from them.

When writing, don't mention people who've criticized you. It doesn't age well. If you're right, no one will have heard of them in the future, and the reference to them will be a distraction. And if you're wrong no one will read your writing in the future, so it won't matter.

The danger of working in secret is inversely proportional to the simplicity and precision of the test. It would be safe to work in secret for a year on a new rocket engine. But if you work in secret for a year on a new social network, it will probably be a flop.

There are, unfortunately, people in the world who enjoy hurting other people. And they don't wear signs advertising this, or everyone would avoid them.

It's a fallacy to think you should drop out of college because you have an idea that has to be implemented right now, or it will be too late. If you stay in school you'll have other and better ideas.