Paul Graham

Quotes are word for word from the source.

• startups

  “Startups are not magic. They don't change the laws of wealth creation. They just represent a point at the far end of the curve.”

  Our noteVerified statement matched against public records.

• wealth

  “There is a conservation law at work here: if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars' worth of pain.”

  Our noteVerified statement matched against public records.

• Performance Measurement

  “I think the single biggest problem afflicting large companies is the difficulty of assigning a value to each person's work.”

  Our noteLarge companies struggle to accurately measure and reward individual contributions.

• Independent Projects

  “Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do.”

  Our noteCultivate the habit of working on your own self directed projects.

• Great Work

  “In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of it.”

  Our noteWorking hard on ambitious projects is the simple recipe for great work.

• Confident Editing

  “Have the confidence to cut. Don't keep something that doesn't fit just because you're proud of it, or because it cost you a lot of effort.”

  Our noteHave the confidence to discard things that do not fit regardless of the effort spent.

• Listening to Feedback

  “when you point out a problem to them, they not only listen, but listen with an almost predatory intensity.”

  Our noteDescribing how highly successful founders react to criticism.

• The hard part

  “The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it.”

  Our notePaul explains that technical building skills are more important than management skills for founders.

• Need for reminders

  “As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them.”

  Our noteGraham explains why he keeps a specific list at the top of his todo list.

• Necessity of taste

  “If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things.”

  Our notePaul Graham explains why taste is a practical tool for makers, not just a theoretical concept.

• Misguided effort

  “A lot of bad design is industrious, but misguided.”

  Our noteOn how hard work doesn't save a product if it solves the wrong problem.

• Learning through practice

  “I started studying painting. And it was just like other kinds of work I'd done: you could do it well, or badly, and if you tried hard, you could get better at it.”

  Our noteGraham describes how practicing an art form revealed that skill and quality are real.

• The trap of bad judgement

  “one of the symptoms of bad judgement is believing you have good judgement. When you're too weak to lift something, you can tell, but when you're making a decision impetuously, you're all the more sure of it.”

  Our noteGraham discusses why it is difficult to convince someone they have poor judgement.

• Investor's core task

  “What "Make something people want" is for startups, "Pick the right startups" is for investors.”

  Our noteHe defines the primary goal of an angel investor.

• Risk of employment

  “getting a normal job may actually make you less able to start a startup, by turning you into a tame animal”

  Our noteHe warns about how corporate environments can diminish entrepreneurial spirit.

• Choosing tools

  “staying close to the main branches is a useful heuristic for finding languages that will be good to program in now.”

  Our notePaul Graham explains why we should look at the long-term evolution of programming languages.

• Cost of disputes

  “Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it.”

  Our noteThe hidden cost of dwelling on conflicts and injuries caused by others.

• Market judgment

  “A startup succeeds or fails depending almost entirely on the efforts of the founders. Success is decided by the market: you only succeed if users like what you've built. And users don't care where you went to college.”

  Our notePaul explains why elite credentials don't matter to customers.

• Learning responsibility

  “how much you learn in college depends a lot more on you than the college. A determined party animal can get through the best school without learning anything.”

  Our notePaul argues that individual drive outweighs institutional prestige.

• Startup vs small business

  “To be a startup, a company has to be a product business, not a service business.”

  Our noteGraham distinguishes between scalable startups and traditional service-based small businesses.

• Founders doing sales

  “a lot of technical-type founders hate the idea of doing sales and going and talking to people, and so you can tell them, "Look, just go do this." You know, after a few months, they'll be used to it.”

  Our notePaul Graham discusses how technical founders can overcome their aversion to sales.

• AI safety challenges

  “trying to make safe AI will be like trying to make a secure operating system. That is absolutely true, and therefore frightening, because the way you make a secure operating system is not by sitting down and thinking at a table with a piece of paper about the principles”

  Our noteGraham compares the difficulty of AI safety to the iterative process of securing an operating system.

• Value of overconfidence

  “being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people's skepticism and your own.”

  Our noteGraham argues that a bit of overconfidence helps founders survive the early, difficult stages.

• Minimal version 1

  “Users hate bugs, but they don't seem to mind a minimal version 1, if there's more coming soon.”

  Our noteHe clarifies that releasing early means releasing something minimal, not something broken.

• Product imagination

  “If your product seems finished, there are two possible explanations: (a) it is finished, or (b) you lack imagination.”

  Our noteHe encourages founders to keep finding ways to improve even when a product feels complete.

• Finding your fit

  “If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for.”

  Our notePaul Graham explains a heuristic for identifying one's ideal career path.

• The Equity Equation

  “You should give up n% of your company if what you trade it for improves your average outcome enough that the (100 - n)% you have left is worth more than the whole company was before.”

  Our noteExplaining the fundamental rule for when to trade equity for investment or talent.

• Dividing complex work

  “If you want to put several people to work on a project, divide it into components and give each to one person.”

  Our noteHow to manage a team without losing the benefits of individual ownership of code.

• Strong but true

  “Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false.”

  Our notePaul Graham defines the balance between precision and correctness in useful writing.

• Default state of startups

  “The problem is not that most towns kill startups. It's that death is the default for startups, and most towns don't save them.”

  Our noteExplaining why most locations fail to produce successful startups compared to hubs.