Paul Graham
Co-founder of Y Combinator. Essays on startups, programming, and life.
startupsprogramminglifethinking
- The Brand Age
- The Shape of the Essay Field
- Good Writing
- What to Do
- The Origins of Wokeness
- Writes and Write-Nots
- When To Do What You Love
- Founder Mode
- The Right Kind of Stubborn
- The Reddits
- How to Start Google
- The Best Essay
- Superlinear Returns
- How to Do Great Work
- The Need to Read
- What You (Want to)* Want
- Alien Truth
- What I've Learned from Users
- Heresy
- Putting Ideas into Words
- Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?
- Beyond Smart
- Weird Languages
- How to Work Hard
- A Project of One's Own
- Fierce Nerds
- Crazy New Ideas
- An NFT That Saves Lives
- The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty
- How People Get Rich Now
- Write Simply
- Donate Unrestricted
- What I Worked On
- Earnestness
- Billionaires Build
- The Airbnbs
- How to Think for Yourself
- Early Work
- Modeling a Wealth Tax
- The Four Quadrants of Conformism
- Orthodox Privilege
- Coronavirus and Credibility
- How to Write Usefully
- Being a Noob
- Haters
- Having Kids
- The Two Kinds of Moderate
- The Lesson to Unlearn
- Novelty and Heresy
- The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
- General and Surprising
- The Risk of Discovery
- How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
- Life is Short
- Economic Inequality
- The Refragmentation
- Jessica Livingston
- A Way to Detect Bias
- Write Like You Talk
- Default Alive or Default Dead?
- Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
- Change Your Name
- What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
- The Ronco Principle
- What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
- Don't Talk to Corp Dev
- Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
- How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
- How You Know
- The Fatal Pinch
- Mean People Fail
- Before the Startup
- How to Raise Money
- Investor Herd Dynamics
- How to Convince Investors
- Do Things that Don't Scale
- Startup Investing Trends
- How to Get Startup Ideas
- The Hardware Renaissance
- Startup = Growth
- Black Swan Farming
- The Top of My Todo List
- Writing and Speaking
- How Y Combinator Started
- Defining Property
- Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
- A Word to the Resourceful
- Schlep Blindness
- Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
- Why Startup Hubs Work
- The Patent Pledge
- Subject: Airbnb
- Founder Control
- Tablets
- What We Look for in Founders
- The New Funding Landscape
- Where to See Silicon Valley
- High Resolution Fundraising
- What Happened to Yahoo
- The Future of Startup Funding
- How to Lose Time and Money
- The Acceleration of Addictiveness
- The Top Idea in Your Mind
- Organic Startup Ideas
- Apple's Mistake
- What Startups Are Really Like
- Persuade xor Discover
- Post-Medium Publishing
- The List of N Things
- The Anatomy of Determination
- What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley
- The Trouble with the Segway
- Ramen Profitable
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
- A Local Revolution?
- The Founder Visa
- Five Founders
- Relentlessly Resourceful
- How to Be an Angel Investor
- Why TV Lost
- Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.
- What I've Learned from Hacker News
- Startups in 13 Sentences
- Keep Your Identity Small
- After Credentials
- Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?
- The High-Res Society
- The Other Half of "Artists Ship"
- Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
- A Fundraising Survival Guide
- The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company
- Cities and Ambition
- Disconnecting Distraction
- Lies We Tell Kids
- Be Good
- Why There Aren't More Googles
- Some Heroes
- How to Disagree
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
- A New Venture Animal
- Trolls
- Six Principles for Making New Things
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub
- The Future of Web Startups
- How to Do Philosophy
- News from the Front
- How Not to Die
- Holding a Program in One's Head
- Stuff
- The Equity Equation
- An Alternative Theory of Unions
- The Hacker's Guide to Investors
- Two Kinds of Judgement
- Microsoft is Dead
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup
- Is It Worth Being Wise?
- Learning from Founders
- How Art Can Be Good
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
- A Student's Guide to Startups
- How to Present to Investors
- Copy What You Like
- The Island Test
- The Power of the Marginal
- Why Startups Condense in America
- How to Be Silicon Valley
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
- See Randomness
- Are Software Patents Evil?
- 6,631,372
- Why YC
- How to Do What You Love
- Good and Bad Procrastination
- Web 2.0
- How to Fund a Startup
- The Venture Capital Squeeze
- Ideas for Startups
- What I Did this Summer
- Inequality and Risk
- After the Ladder
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source
- Hiring is Obsolete
- The Submarine
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
- Return of the Mac
- Writing, Briefly
- Undergraduation
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckage
- How to Start a Startup
- What You'll Wish You'd Known
- Made in USA
- It's Charisma, Stupid
- Bradley's Ghost
- A Version 1.0
- What the Bubble Got Right
- The Age of the Essay
- The Python Paradox
- Great Hackers
- Mind the Gap
- How to Make Wealth
- The Word "Hacker"
- What You Can't Say
- Filters that Fight Back
- Hackers and Painters
- If Lisp is So Great
- The Hundred-Year Language
- Why Nerds are Unpopular
- Better Bayesian Filtering
- Design and Research
- A Plan for Spam
- Revenge of the Nerds
- Succinctness is Power
- Taste for Makers
- What Made Lisp Different
- The Other Road Ahead
- The Roots of Lisp
- Five Questions about Language Design
- Being Popular
- Java's Cover
- Beating the Averages
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications
- What Languages Fix
- Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented
- Programming Bottom-Up