Paul Graham Quotes

“You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to be like these people?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies.”

“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.”

“A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone eats.”

“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.”

“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.”

“Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties.”

“Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own.”

“It's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy.”

“In college I was going to study philosophy, which sounded much more powerful. It seemed, to my naive high school self, to be the study of the ultimate truths, compared to which the things studied in other fields would be mere domain knowledge.”

“If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.”

“One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond.”

“VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.”