Quotes by Paul Graham

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

You cant 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.

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

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 isnt.

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

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

If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didnt get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you’ll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don’t just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it’s really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That’s the way the government does things. They do something really big that’s really bad, and they think, Well, we’ll make it better, and then it never gets better”.Building Fast Companies for Growth, Inc. September 2013

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.

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.

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.

Keep your identity small.

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they dont win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.”-“The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. Thats where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and having the same people both design and implement the product. Microsoft themselves did this at the start. So did Apple. And Hewlett- Packard. I suspect almost every successful startup has.”-“Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.”-“The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible, as articulated as programming languages. Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the users point of view.”-“It turns out that looking at things from other peoples point of view is practically the secret of success.”-“Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So to write good software you have to understand how little users understand. Theyre going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and it had better do what they guess it will, because theyre not going to read the manual.

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.

If youll laugh about something one day, you may as well start now.

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

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 dont do that, it wont matter how clever your business model is.

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.

Its hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasnt yet been duplicated by technology.