Paul Graham
also referred to as: pg
60 statements across 30 episodes · 26 bullish · 11 bearish · 22 people on the record · first statement Oct 26, 2013 by Paul Graham · said 312 times in 89 episodes since 2014 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Paul Graham's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Jessica Livingston (49), Garry Tan (21), Michael Seibel (18), Kevin Hale (17), Karen Appman (17), Paul Buchheit (14), Sam Altman (12), Jared Friedman (11)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 25 mentions in 8 episodes 3 per episode
- Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup" · Y Combinator
- The Age Of The 40-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Here · Y Combinator
- Replit's CEO On The Only Two Jobs Left In The Company Of The Future · Y Combinator
- Multi-GPU Kernels, Intelligence per Watt, Heterogeneous Inference, and More | YC Paper Club · Y Combinator
- How Two French Engineers In New York Built The Company That Monitors The Entire Cloud · Y Combinator
- François Chollet: Why Scaling Alone Isn’t Enough for AGI · Y Combinator
- AI Is Unlocking Millions Of New Builders · Y Combinator
- We're All Addicted To Claude Code · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 23 mentions in 14 episodes 2 per episode
- Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware · Y Combinator
- How To Build The Future: Parker Conrad · Y Combinator
- Building A $2 Billion SaaS Company: Lessons From A Two Time Founder · Y Combinator
- Michael Truell: Building Cursor At 23, Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students · Y Combinator
- The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street · Y Combinator
- How Amplitude Went From Skeptics to “All In” on AI · Y Combinator
- The Best Consumer Startup Ideas Were Impossible Until Now · Y Combinator
- The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew · Y Combinator
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 29 mentions in 5 episodes 6 per episode
- Startup Experts Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale · Y Combinator
- How To Build The Future: Sam Altman · Y Combinator
- How David Lieb Turned a Failing Startup Into Google Photos | Backstory · Y Combinator
- The Truth About Building AI Startups Today · Y Combinator
- How Do Billion Dollar Startups Start? · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2022 23 mentions in 4 episodes 6 per episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 28 mentions in 10 episodes 3 per episode
- Kevin Hale - How to Evaluate Startup Ideas · Y Combinator
- Gustaf Alströmer - Growth for Startups · Y Combinator
- HubSpot CEO and Cofounder Brian Halligan with Wufoo Cofounder Kevin Hale · Y Combinator
- Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
- Updates for Startup School 2019 and Office Hours with Kevin Hale · Y Combinator
- A CS Education That's Free Until You Get a Job - Austen Allred of Lambda School · Y Combinator
- Laks Srini on Making Homeownership in Reach with ZeroDown · Y Combinator
- EconTalk Host Russ Roberts on Key Economic Concepts for Founders · Y Combinator
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 125 mentions in 27 episodes 5 per episode
- Jessica Livingston Shares 9 Things She Learned From Founding YC · Y Combinator
- It's Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done - Sam Chaudhary of ClassDojo · Y Combinator
- Breaking Down HackerRank's Survey of 40,000 Developers with Vivek Ravisankar · Y Combinator
- Paul Buchheit - Startup Investor School Day 2 · Y Combinator
- The Path to $100B by Paul Buchheit · Y Combinator
- Uncut Interview with Sam Altman on Masters of Scale [Audio] · Y Combinator
- Starting a Startup After Business School - Reham Fagiri and Kalam Dennis of AptDeco · Y Combinator
- Startup Technology - Technical Founder Advice · Y Combinator
- 19 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 30 mentions in 12 episodes 3 per episode
- The Challenges a Repeat Founder Faces - Tikhon Bernstam · Y Combinator
- Your Whole Goal Is to Not Quit - Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers · Y Combinator
- Team and Execution with Sam Altman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 2) · Y Combinator
- Founders of Science Exchange, Goldbely, and The Flex Company Discuss Fundraising · Y Combinator
- Drew Houston : How to Build the Future · Y Combinator
- Be Wary of Solving a Small, Rare Problem - Des Traynor of Intercom · Y Combinator
- Content Marketing Tips from Experts at First Round Capital and Andreessen Horowitz · Y Combinator
- Building a Startup is About Solving a Problem - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy · Y Combinator
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2017 →
2016 15 mentions in 3 episodes 5 per episode
2015 1 mention in 1 episode
2014 7 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Paul Graham, oldest first
Oct 26, 2013 negative
Oct 26, 2013 negative
Oct 26, 2013
Graham: Early-stage startups should stay empirical rather than over-optimize too early
“Don't be, don't, like over optimize too early. Like, let it grow into whatever it's gonna grow into. Maybe it'll end up being kids are the big thing, or maybe not, who knows. But be empirical about it, and don't, like, wire in some outcome too early.”
Oct 26, 2013
Mar 12, 2014 negative
Livingston: Press credited Paul Graham for a conference announcement she wrote
“I spent all morning working on announcing this conference, and here's my blog post right here, announcing the female founders conference, and so what turned up later that day in the press? Paul Graham announced his conference for women founders.”
Feb 23, 2015 positive
Livingston: Separate functional domains help married co-founders avoid competition
“We didn't do the same things, so we weren't competitive, and I think that that was useful. We were always sort of trying to make YC better, but because we did different things, we, you know, had our own domains, and that was probably good for our marriage.”
Aug 30, 2016 neutral
Aug 30, 2016
Livingston: YC moved to Silicon Valley to avoid being copied there
“We knew that people could easily copy us, and we didn't want someone else to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. Like, we wanted to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley, and I remember Paul saying, we gotta go out there, and I remember thinking, like, ah, …”
Aug 30, 2016 neutral
Aug 18, 2017 positive
Paul Graham connected Zapier to a target partner VP within two days
“And then when we got in YC, one of the first things I did was, you know, emailed the folks and PG was like, oh yeah, we can help with that. And found a, you know, like a company that acquired like their CEO and like I had an intro to like a high level VP, like…”
Sep 8, 2017 positive
Bernstam: Scribd and most early batch startups would have failed without YC
“Honestly, we would never have made it without that program. And I think that's true of actually most Of those companies and I, I'd argue probably most of the companies because without that community of, like, like-minded people who are highly motivated and wor…”
Sep 8, 2017 neutral
Bernstam: Reddit originally applied to Y Combinator as a food delivery startup
“Much like Reddit was actually a pivot company where like it was actually applied for as something else. Like it was like food delivery stuff. Paul's like, I, yeah, Paul's like, I love you guys, Steve and Alexis, but I hate that idea.”
Sep 8, 2017 neutral
Bernstam: Parse was formed by merging three independent entities
“Parse is actually the merger of three independent entities. So Ilya was a solo founder in Parse. Working on like a find your friends app sort of thing. Which like was very popular at the time. And Kevin wasn't even in YC. Kevin emailed, Kevin had been in YC pr…”
Oct 13, 2017 positive
Dec 13, 2017 bullish
Founders avoid massive fintech simplification opportunities due to operational schlep work
“I think that model, and I'm not saying chatbots aren't the thing here so much as drastic simplification is the thing. The Q and A maybe suggests that a chatbot might be like charming as a way to do it, or like at least unique from a brand perspective. But I th…”
Jan 24, 2018 positive
Chaudhary: PG casually wrote an angel check picked up at his house
“Two days in PG is like, okay, I'm in and like, whatever, I'll write you guys a check and just come around and pick it up. And we're like, So we basically spammed PG for the best part of a week after already having a lot of funding. And then, yeah, then Liam bi…”
Feb 23, 2018 positive
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Buchheit: Paul Graham's essays are a top lead source for YC applicants
“To this day, I believe it's like the number one or number two source of leads to people applying to Y Combinator. We ask a question on the application, how did you hear about Y Combinator? And they say, from Paul Graham's essays.”
Aug 7, 2018 positive
Ralston: Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, and Michael Seibel to speak at Startup School
“Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston will be taking part in the course and giving some of their wisdom, which is also broad need to founders everywhere in the world, but we're also going to have other YC partners. Sam Altman, who's the president of Y Combinator,…”
Sep 1, 2018 negative
Sep 1, 2018
Graham: Y Combinator launched in under a week using email ASCII forms
“We launched YC probably in less than a week of having the idea. Of course, launching it was merely saying, was merely posting a website and, ah, and we didn't have any software in the beginning. People, we just had this ASCII form that people would fill out an…”
Sep 1, 2018 positive
Paul Graham: Constant startup growth rate matters more than absolute user count
“You just keep going out there and doing things manually, and as long as your growth rate is good, it doesn't matter how small the number is because a growth, a constant growth rate means exponential growth, and that means The base number will soon take care of…”
Sep 1, 2018
Graham: Startup ideas begin as vague inklings, not lightbulb epiphanies
“I always hate it when people represent startup ideas as light bulbs, you know, because as well as being the most cliched metaphor imaginable, it's also false. You don't just like have this idea and then realize it, right? No, it's more like you have this sort …”
Sep 1, 2018 neutral
Graham: Barely any of 1,900 YC startups were killed by competitors
“What makes companies fail most of the time is poor execution by the founders, right? We often talk to startups who are worried about competitors, and one good, one advantage of YC having funded so many companies is you have a really large data set, and like, h…”
Sep 1, 2018 positive
Sep 1, 2018 positive
Graham: Grandfathering early users eliminates the risk of raising startup prices
“If you want to lower your prices, no one's going to complain. And if you want to grant, if you want to raise your prices, you just grandfather your existing users, which if you have exponential growth will always be a tiny subset of your total users, and then …”
Sep 1, 2018 positive
Sep 1, 2018 neutral
Graham: Better to have 10% of Robert Morris than average full-time founders
“Ok, so the way you deal with different commitment levels is you ask yourself would I rather have 30% of this person or a hundred percent of some other person? And in my case, I would rather have, like, 10% of Robert Morris's brain than a hundred percent of alm…”
Sep 1, 2018
Sep 1, 2018 negative
Paul Graham: Working 20 years at big companies indicates poor founder fit
“I think if you have worked for a large company for 20 years, you might not be a founder, unless you were forced to for visa reasons, because if you were the kind of person that would make a good founder, you wouldn't be able to stand working for a large compan…”
Sep 1, 2018 positive
Graham: The best startup ideas seem implausible in the right way
“I love it when ideas seem implausible in the right way. Over the years, I mean, I already had, just from being a hacker, a sort of a good nose for this sort of thing, but it has become refined over all these years of dealing with startups, and when people have…”
Sep 1, 2018 negative
Graham: Founders fail by avoiding user feedback and overbuilding visions
“What you will get wrong is that you will not pay enough attention to users. You will have, you will make up some idea in your own head that you will call your vision and then you will spend a lot of time thinking about your vision in a cafe by yourself and wri…”
Sep 1, 2018 positive
Graham: Obsessing over users creates great products without visionary creativity
“If you care enough about users, you can just follow what will make users happy the way a scientist follows the truth, and eventually, Without much thinking on your part the need to grow will give you this product idea that's actually the product, that's the re…”
Sep 1, 2018 negative
Sep 1, 2018 neutral
Graham: Morris voted for lowball ViaWeb acquisition offers to quit
“Whenever we got an, whenever you get an acquisition offer, the board has to at least consider it, right? And so, you would get these crap lowball acquisition offers. We'll give you, like, two million dollars in our stock, right? And Robert was like, yes, no, n…”
Sep 1, 2018 negative
Sep 1, 2018
Paul Graham: Founders ignore advice because counterintuitive lessons feel wrong
“We tell people the counterintuitive stuff, not the obvious stuff, and then what counterintuitive means is it sounds wrong, and so they go with their gut and do the wrong thing instead and then hopefully catch the mistake in time.”
Sep 1, 2018 negative
Sep 1, 2018
Paul Graham: Startups are counterintuitive, which is why Y Combinator exists
“Startups in general are very, very counterintuitive. And so that's actually why C exists. If it was obvious what to do in starting a startup, We wouldn't, YC couldn't really add much by teaching people how to do it, right?”
Sep 12, 2018
Doshi: Startups lose most visitors because the back button is the enemy
“And I also wanted to mention that having a really bad landing page there's this really awesome quote that PG used to have in our batch that I thought I would impart on you, which is that, like, people basically just have their mouse, like, hovering on the back…”
Sep 19, 2018 positive
Cannon: Y Combinator has relied on content marketing since its inception
“YC, Although PG and Jessica, Robert and Trevor might not say this, has been doing, like, content marketing since the very beginning. Even before. So with Paul's essays, and then Hacker News was built, and then those essays do really well, and that's the exact …”
Oct 12, 2018 positive
Migicovsky: Pivot to building end products if customers won't buy your technology
“If you're in a situation where you're building something that's, like, mind-blowingly cool and revolutionary, but you're finding that customers don't want to buy it, pivot your company so you're actually doing what your customers would have done, and just use …”
Mar 6, 2019
Jul 25, 2019
Jul 25, 2019 positive
Jul 25, 2019 positive
Hale: Paul Graham Bootstrapped YC Distribution via His Essay Audience
“PG was able to sort of build up YC and attract the right talent because he had a huge reach or audience when he got started. He had written that textbook, yes, but he also wrote all these popular online essays and had a large audience of his target users, hack…”
Jul 25, 2019 negative
Graham and Andreessen's product-market fit definitions are lagging indicators
“Paul Graham's definition for product market fit is when you've made something that people want. Marc Andreessen also has an amazing blog post about product market fit where he describes it as when the product is just being pulled out of you, when you no longer…”
Jan 28, 2020 positive
Pachama raised double its target from Ryan Graves, Sacca, and Accel
“We ended up racing almost twice as much as we wanted to race initially from an amazing group of people. Our lead investor is Ryan Graves, the co-founder of Uber. He, who has experience building a global marketplace. We got investment from Chris Saka, who, you …”
Mar 31, 2022 positive
Seibel: YC minimizes scheduled events to maximize founder maker time
“Like one, there aren't that many events. You don't have classes all day at YC. Like, you know, we try to take as little time as possible during your week so you can actually get shit done. Two, there's a hard deadline, demo day. And three, I think people are o…”
Mar 31, 2022
Caldwell: Effective programming requires eight-hour uninterrupted blocks of maker time
“When you're programming, the more of the program you can keep in your head at any one time, The easier it is for you to know what's going on and have the context up here to make changes and fix bugs. And it takes like an hour or two cold of looking at a progra…”
May 6, 2022
Dec 29, 2022 positive
Feb 5, 2023 positive
Paul Graham founded YC for builders who rejected status and waiting
“PG originally started YC to be a home for this type of people, right? To be a home for people who wanted to build, who didn't want to wait in line, who really didn't care about status in and of itself. They just wanted to go out there and like challenge themse…”
May 30, 2024 negative
Friedman: Google's early success warped founders into obsessing over premature scalability
“I actually think Google is indirectly responsible responsible for basically scaling. Warping the minds of a whole generation of founders and investors and creating the problem that Paul Graham had to solve with this, which is because Google became so famous fo…”
Jan 31, 2025 positive
McGrew: Learning to code builds critical thinking even if AI writes code
“And I think the answer is that like right now we still have to, like, this is how you learn how to do critical thinking. And, you know, I think back to Paul Graham's idea of the resistance of the medium, like even once You know, the computer can do the program…”
Apr 25, 2026
May 13, 2026 positive
Jul 24, 2026 neutral