Paul Graham's Essays Part III

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first 10 employees. I agree.”

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

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“The immediate cause of death in a startup is to, is always running out of money, which is exactly what Don Valentine just told us. So the cheaper your company, this is the punchline here. So the cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill.”

“They paid half a billion dollars essentially to rehire Steve Jobs, and it was the bargain of the century.”

“Technology is just going to lead to a more, an ever increasing variance in the amount of productivity that one person could have, and therefore an ever increasing variance in the amount of wealth that one person has and one person doesn't.”

“If society doesn't catch up to understanding that wealth is not finite and something that should be growing over time, it could lead to a lot of, you know, social unrest and cultural issues.”

“In every case, their creation of wealth seems to appear and disappear. That's a really important part. Like the noise of a fan as you switch on and off the prospect of keeping it.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”