Paul Graham

“YC has founded 1900 plus companies at the time. This is several years ago. One was killed by competitors.”

“I think within two years, they sold it for close to fifty million dollars to Yahoo.”

“I think they are the Most influential writing for technology startups ever.”

“But in fact, the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.”

“You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea. Or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't.”

“If you pick an ambitious idea, you'll have less competition because everyone else would have been frightened off by the challenges involved.”

“Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed.”

“Often founders know what their problems are, but not their relative importance. They'll come in to talk about three problems they're worrying about. One is of moderate importance. One doesn't matter at all. And one will kill the company. If it isn't addressed …”

“One of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees.”

“Many problems have a hardcore at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming towards the center to the extent that you can.”

“The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking, what problem should I solve? Ask, what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?”

“The most dangerous way to lose time is to not spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.”

“A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can.”

“Once you've advised a hundred startups, all doing different things, you rarely encounter problems you haven't seen before.”

“If you correct course at a high enough frequency, you can be simultaneously decisive at a micro scale and tentative at a macro scale.”

“Unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.”

“And then I like this point, the only way to find your limit for working is by crossing it. Honesty is critical here in both directions. You have to notice when you're being lazy, but also when you're working too hard.”

“If you can make something that appeals to people today, and would also have appealed to people in 15, in the year 1500, there's a good chance that it will appeal to people in the year 2500.”

“If we have learned one thing from funding so many startups is that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of founders. The economy has some effects, certainly, but as a predictor of success, it's a rounding error compared to the founders, which means that…”

“Run upstairs, which means the harder something is to do, the less competition you're going to have.”

“Attitudes to copying often make a round trip. A novice imitates without knowing it. Next, he tries consciously to be original. Finally, this is excellent. Finally, he decides it's more important to be right than original.”

“Money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice, they are usually interchangeable, but they are not the same thing.”

“Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness.”

“In business, there's nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand.”

“Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things, whatever job people do, they naturally want to do it better. Football players like to win games. CEOs …”

“To get rich, you have to have leverage in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect. If you're in a job that feels safe, you're not going to get rich because if there's no danger, there's almost certainly no leverage.”

“Software is a very competitive business prone to natural monopolies. A company that gets software written faster and better will, all other things being equal, put its competitors out of business.”

“You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.”

“Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. Great work still comes disproportionately from a few hot spots.”

“There is a large random multiplier in the success of any company. Most startups tank. It's common for a startup to be developing a genuinely good product, take slightly too long to do it, run out of money, and have to shut down.”

“If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we would always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, but because it was harder. We delighted in forcing bigger, slower comp…”

“When a piece of code is being hacked by three or four different people, no one of whom really owns it will end up being like a common room. The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules. Each with a definitive owner …”

“When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.”

“This is not a problem for big companies because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.”

“In practice, it is easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly.”

“You can't do anything really well unless you love it, and if you love to hack, you'll inevitably be working on projects of your own.”

“A great programmer could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth.”

“A very able person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers.”

“That building a great product is not scientific. It's not something that could just be derived from data alone. You have to have taste, and one way to develop taste is through years of practice”

“Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bl…”

“He was asked one time, what plays a more important role in the success of entrepreneurs determination or intelligence. And he said, determination by far.”

“I think Paul Graham said the number one breakup of, in Y Combinator is not like external factors. It's actually co-founder conflict.”

“If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work, and the oracle had to reply with a single word, my bet would be on curiosity.”

“People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done rather than nothing. And of course done over a long period of time.”