So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be a… - Paul Graham

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Engraved portrait of Paul Graham, facing right

So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It’s hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it’s hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.

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About Paul Graham

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)

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Additional quotes by Paul Graham

"When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's "form follows function," what they meant was,
form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it,
because there is no effort to spare for error.
Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives."

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If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.

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