Paul Graham’s essays are filled with great insight on startups, technology, and building things that matter. Here are a few of the passages that stuck with me.
“The more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally . . . the feeling of being a noob is inversely correlated with actual ignorance.”
On TJ Rodgers:
“Brutally candid; aggressively garbage-collecting outdated ideas; and yet driven by pragmatism rather than ideology.”
On Larry Page and Sergey Brin:
“Their hypothesis seems to have been that, in the initial stages at least, all you need is good hackers: if you hire all the smartest people and put them to work on a problem where their success can be measured, you win. All the other stuff — which includes all the stuff that business schools consists of — you can figure out along the way.”
“It’s better, initially, to make a small number of users really love you, than a large number of users kind of like you.”
“It’s hard to do a good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower . . . There’s a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I’m increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary . . . Be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.”
“Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there’s a third ingredient that’s not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.”
“If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.”
“You don’t need to push yourself as hard when curiosity is pulling you”
“If something that seems like work to other people doesn’t seem like work to you, that’s something you’re well suited for.”
“The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.”
“When talented people become interested in random things, they’re not truly random.”
“It may be that to do great work, you have to waste a lot of time. In many different areas, reward is proportionate to risk. If that rule holds here, then the way to find paths that lead to truly great work is to be willing to expend a lot of effort on things that turn out to be every bit as unpromising as they seem.”
“If you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn’t be important but would be really interesting, what would it be?”
“The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn’t something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.”
“The initial idea of a startup is just a starting point — not a blueprint, but a question.”
“I find that to have good ideas I need to be working on some problem. You can’t start with randomness. You have to let your mind wander just far enough for new ideas to form.”
“In a way, it’s harder to see problems than their solutions.”
“The way to make money is to make something people want.”
“The best way to solve a problem is often to redefine it.”
Startups in 13 Sentences
- Pick good cofounders
- Launch fast
- Let your idea evolve
- Understand your users
- Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent
- Offer surprisingly good customer service
- You make what you measure
- Spend little
- Get ramen profitable
- Avoid distractions
- Don’t get demoralized
- Don’t give up
- Deals fall through