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
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Portrait adapted from
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Most successful startups consist of a wonderfully popular product more than compensating for many mistakes by the founders. You have to have that wonderfully popular product or there is too little margin for error. But if you do, it will buy your way out of all kinds of trouble.
This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization. A great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace.
One of the more subtle pitfalls of starting a startup when you're too young is that you can't hire well, because you haven't had enough experience to be a good judge of people. You can judge technical ability but not character, so you end up hiring smart jerks.
