Paul Graham Essays 📝

One of the most valuable things my father taught me is an old Yorkshire saying: where there's muck, there's brass. Meaning that unpleasant work pays. — @paulg

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"As Ben Franklin said, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is what life is made of." — @paulg

"You're all smart and working on promising ideas. Whether you end up among the living or the dead comes down to the third ingredient, not giving up." — @paulg

"Curiosity is unlike most other appetites in this respect: Indulging it tends to increase rather than to sate it. Questions lead to more questions." — @paulg

"Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong." — @paulg

"Since startups make money by offering people something better than they had before, the best opportunities are where things suck most. And it would be hard to find a place where things suck more than in corporate IT departments." — @paulg

"The ambitious are not content to imitate." — @paulg

"If you have two choices, choose the harder." — @paulg

"In a world with superlinear returns, it's even more valuable to know what you're interested in, and to find ways to work on it." — @paulg

"The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: They're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing." — @paulg

"It's obvious why investors delay. Investing in startups is risky! When a company is only two months old, every day you wait gives you 1.7% more data about their trajectory." — @paulg

"What nerds like is other nerds. Smart people will go wherever other smart people are." — @paulg

"Attention is a zero sum game. If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project that's not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then it's getting in the way of another project that is." — @paulg

"The way not to have to raise money is not to spend money. Do everything as cheaply as you possibly can. What you want in a startup is this feeling of cheap and hip. Not miserly cheap, but cool, bohemian cheap. That’s what we strove for." — @paulg

"Running a startup is like walking on your hands: It's possible, but it requires extraordinary effort." — @paulg

"Any investor who co-invests with you is one less investor who could fund a competitor. Apparently Kleiner and Sequoia didn't like splitting the Google deal, but it did at least have the advantage that there probably wouldn't be a competitor funded by the other." — @paulg

"One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a balloon bursting. You can inoculate yourself against this by explicitly considering setbacks a part of your process." — @paulg

"The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite." — @paulg

"A lot of startups have that form: Someone comes along and makes something for a tenth or a hundredth of what it used to cost, and the existing players can't follow because they don't even want to think about a world in which that's possible." — @paulg

"Startup founders are naturally optimistic. They wouldn't do it otherwise. But you should treat your optimism the way you'd treat the core of a nuclear reactor: As a source of power that's also very dangerous. You have to build a shield around it, or it will fry you." — @paulg