Paul Graham Quotes

#1. Like having a child, running a startup is the sort of experience that's hard to imagine unless you've done it yourself.

Paul Graham

#2. Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part.

Paul Graham

#3. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter.

Paul Graham

#4. At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.

Paul Graham

#5. The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Paul Graham

#6. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses.

Paul Graham

#7. If you want to create wealth (in the narrow technical sense of not starving), then you should be especially skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like doing.

Paul Graham

#8. There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.

Paul Graham

#9. 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.

Paul Graham

#10. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

Paul Graham

#11. If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.

Paul Graham

#12. We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.

Paul Graham

#13. In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do.

Paul Graham

#14. Looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success.

Paul Graham

#15. It's hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn't yet been duplicated by technology.

Paul Graham

#16. If the hacker is a creator, we have to take inspiration into account.

Paul Graham

#17. If you'll laugh about something one day, you may as well start now.

Paul Graham

#18. You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.

Paul Graham

#19. It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

Paul Graham

#20. If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

Paul Graham

#21. Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.

Paul Graham

#22. For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.

Paul Graham

#23. You know your business model is broken when you're suing your customers.

Paul Graham

#24. A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

Paul Graham

#25. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

Paul Graham

#26. Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are. I think mathematicians also believe this. At

Paul Graham

#27. The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner,

Paul Graham

#28. I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You'd think examples like that would be enough to convince people.

Paul Graham

#29. Startups often have to do dubious things.

Paul Graham

#30. Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

Paul Graham

#31. Venture capitalists have a list of danger signs to watch out for. Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of making users happy.

Paul Graham

#32. Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

Paul Graham

#33. When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project.

Paul Graham

#34. No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.

Paul Graham

#35. People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.

Paul Graham

#36. The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.

Paul Graham

#37. Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.

Paul Graham

#38. In hacking, like painting, work comes in cycles. Sometimes you get excited about a new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it. Other times nothing seems interesting.

Paul Graham

#39. Empathy doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations - in war, for example - you want to do exactly the opposite.

Paul Graham

#40. If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

Paul Graham

#41. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

Paul Graham

#42. I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.

Paul Graham

#43. We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30.

Paul Graham

#44. One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies.

Paul Graham

#45. What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

Paul Graham

#46. People who do good work often think that whatever they're working on is no good. Others see what they've done and think it's wonderful, but the creator sees nothing but flaws. This pattern is no coincidence: worry made the work good.

Paul Graham

#47. I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

Paul Graham

#48. Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems likes the problem is important enough to build a company on.

Paul Graham

#49. Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.

Paul Graham

#50. Keep your identity small.

Paul Graham

#51. If you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.

Paul Graham

#52. If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.

Paul Graham

#53. Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.

Paul Graham

#54. Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So

Paul Graham

#55. Some people just get what they want in the world.

Paul Graham

#56. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery.

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#57. Get a version 1.0 out there as soon as you can. Until you have some users to measure, you're optimizing based on guesses.

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#58. In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.

Paul Graham

#59. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired.

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#60. If you have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn't center on you.

Paul Graham

#61. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.

Paul Graham

#62. The standard to compare your software to is what it could be, not what your current competitors happen to have.

Paul Graham

#63. It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

Paul Graham

#64. And for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Paul Graham

#65. The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about.

Paul Graham

#66. If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility.

Paul Graham

#67. You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.

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#68. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

Paul Graham

#69. Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need.

Paul Graham

#70. If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.

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#71. Wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALS and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison.

Paul Graham

#72. Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one.

Paul Graham

#73. Someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

Paul Graham

#74. There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.

Paul Graham

#75. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.

Paul Graham

#76. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.

Paul Graham

#77. If you could replace high-school yearbooks, that could be a lot of money. It's so clearly waiting for someone to come along.

Paul Graham

#78. Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that techincally inept business types are known as suits.

Paul Graham

#79. In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called "corruption") when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.

Paul Graham

#80. Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work.

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#81. Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

Paul Graham

#82. In the startup world, 'not working' is normal.

Paul Graham