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 foun… - Paul Graham
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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.
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.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Crédit photo: Sarah Harlin (Public domain / CC0)
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.
The other thing that's different about the real world [compared to high school] is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together.
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Be careful about spreading the idea that adversity leads to success. It may, in some cases, but you want to be precise about which cases, and sure of your evidence. Otherwise you're implicitly telling parents to maltreat their kids.
