Paul Graham

The companies I love working with in office hours are the ones where the founder has a specific, weird, earned insight that nobody else has. Not "AI for X." A genuine edge that came from living inside a problem. The ones that are dying almost always have the same pattern: technically competent founders building something nobody asked for, moving metrics that don't matter, avoiding the conversation with the one user who'd tell them the truth. The lucky thing is that 2nd type of founder can become the 1st kind if they don't stand still, they are willing to talk to people, try things, and always seek high rate of learning.

@Nick_Davidov @mattyglesias Just as in the woke era they thought this explained the lack of startups founded by women and "people of color".

@paulg @mattyglesias Based on the comments to my posts they trully believe that since the unicorns were created by immigrants it’s because we (VCs) haven’t provided the funding to heritage American founders

Think of all the unicorn founder jobs these guys have poached from native-born Americans

Whenever there’s a question of “Why is ____ so expensive???” The answer is almost always a collection of regulations you had no idea exist

@Housebots That would be unwise. It would be a mistake to ignore these people for the same reason it was a mistake to ignore them in Germany in the 1920s and 30s.

@paulg Have you considered getting over it?

A guy I follow drew the attention of a xenophobic mob, and it was even uglier than the woke mobs of the old days. We all know in principle that such people walk among us, but it was still shocking to see them all with their masks off.

Nearly half of the founders of billion-dollar tech startups are immigrants

@mattzieger It takes at least 2 hours for ours.

@paulg Pre-heating with wood always takes longer than I expect. Usually takes me an hour plus to get the stone to temp in a Gozney, but I bet yours takes longer!

First pizzas of the season.

@hopes_revenge I made normal pepperoni pizza for 14 yo and his friends, but that one is a pizza bianca I made for myself.

@paulg here

@mattzieger Looks like you managed to get the oven hotter than I did...

@paulg Love to see it!

@Sherifdeenolat2 You may not know me, but your bot has been replying to me. That's the whole problem.

Wtf is this? Why he blocked me tho, I don’t even know him

@OfficialMoeZee @Jason Did he too? Apparently several people did.

@paulg Referring to @Jason?

When Jessica laughs, she really laughs.

@behindceo It's not aimed at them. They're beyond redemption (or reason). It's aimed at the swing voters.

@paulg what makes this hard is that the people who most need to hear it will skip right past it

@NeelamDesai3000 They aren't currently rioting in the streets, but their souls seem uglier, yes.

@paulg I’m sure it was uglier than the BLM mobs that burned down dozens of cities in 2020. Oh wait

@PatrickHeizer Fortunately I've now forgotten which one we used for that.

Mixing up pancakes in the household vomit bowl.

@JonHaidt Why did it begin then?

The learning recession for American students began in 2013. Decades of progress began to reverse:

@KareemAmerX Me too.

@paulg That USCIS decision revealed a lot of them. It's like a cancer. I blocked so many yesterday.

@startwithv1 Yes, that's true. They were saying exactly the sorts of things an adversary of the US would have its bots saying.

@paulg And a good majority of them are bots posting with the intention of getting others to believe being a moron is popular.

@y_molodtsov Disastrously bad candidates can certainly win national elections. It would probably be sufficient just to prevent that.

@paulg But can actually good candidates even win national elections? Hard to remember the last time it happened in a top-tier democratic country.

So much of the badness in the world is caused by misgovernment that I sometimes think the most effective form of philanthropy would simply be to donate to political campaigns.