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Paul Graham

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Paul Graham (born 13 November 1964) is an English-born American computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author, and essayist. He is best known for...

Paul Graham (born 13 November 1964) is an English-born American computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author, and essayist. He is best known for his work on Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed "Yahoo! Store"), co-founding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his blog, and Hacker News. He is the author of several programming books, such as: On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). Technology journalist Steven Levy has described Graham as a "hacker philosopher".

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Book
Hackers & Painters
Hackers & Painters
*Description from Goodreads:* “The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you’re willing to risk the consequences.” —from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham We are living in the computer age,
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Article
The Refragmentation
  • Jan, 2016
The Refragmentation
One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground. The creative class flocks to a handful of happy cities, abandoning the res
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Article
Hackers and Painters
Hackers and Painters
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Recommended by Tommy Collison
Article
How to Disagree
How to Disagree
The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.
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Article
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
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. To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some group of people, and I'm going to choose bus
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Recommended by Stewart Brand
Article
What makes Paul Graham a great writer?
What makes Paul Graham a great writer?
Paul Graham, besides being an entrepreneur & investor, is among today's most widely admired essayists. What makes his writing so great? Here are some clues.
ellenrhymes.com
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Recommended by David Perell
Article
The Four Quadrants of Conformism
  • Jul, 2020
The Four Quadrants of Conformism
One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom
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Recommended by Keith Rabois
Article
A Fundraising Survival Guide
A Fundraising Survival Guide
Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want: most startups that die, die because they didn't do that. But the second biggest cause of death is probably the difficulty of raising money. Fundraising is brutal. One reason it's so b
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Recommended by Y Combinator
Article
How to Fund a Startup
How to Fund a Startup
Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the next gear. Few startups get it quite right. Many are underfunded. A few are overfunded, which is like tr
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Article
The Hacker's Guide to Investors
The Hacker's Guide to Investors
(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2007 ASES Summit at Stanford.) The world of investors is a foreign one to most hackers—partly because investors are so unlike hackers, and partly because they tend to operate in secret. I've been dealing with this world for many years, both as a f
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Article
How to Present to Investors
How to Present to Investors
In a few days it will be Demo Day, when the startups we funded this summer present to investors. Y Combinator funds startups twice a year, in January and June. Ten weeks later we invite all the investors we know to hear them present what they've built so far.
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Article
The Equity Equation
The Equity Equation
An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Should you take it? You're about to hire your first employee. How much stock should you give him? These are some of the hardest questions founders face. And yet both have the same answer: 1/(1 - n) Whenever you're tradi
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Article
The Venture Capital Squeeze
The Venture Capital Squeeze
In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. They're already stuck with a seller's market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the Bubble and still haven't invested. This by itself is not the end of the world. In fact, it's just a
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Article
How to Convince Investors
How to Convince Investors
When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors. They try to convince with their pitch. Most wou
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Article
How to Raise Money
How to Raise Money
Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something like Y Combinator or individual angels, then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company, and then (3) once the company is clea
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Article
The Ronco Principle
The Ronco Principle
No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it. And yet he's a super nice guy. In fact, nice is not the word. Ronco is good. I know of zero instances in which he has behaved badl
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Article
The Lesson to Unlearn
The Lesson to Unlearn
The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades. When I was in college, a particularly earnest philosophy grad student once told me that he never cared what grade he got in a class, only what he learned in it. This
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Recommended by Mike Maples, Jr
Video
A Conversation with Paul Graham - Moderated by Geoff Ralston
A Conversation with Paul Graham - Moderated by Geoff Ralston
YC Partner Geoff Ralston talks with Paul Graham, one of the founders of YC, and tries to draw out as much startup wisdom as possible in an hour of conversation. Transcript can be found here: https://bit.ly/2PrEiTw Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org
www.youtube.com 63 min
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