Paul Graham

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Paul Graham (born 1964) is an American essayist, entrepreneur, investor, and programmer. He is known for his essays on hackers, startups, and programming languages.


  • The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.
  • Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.
  • As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live.
  • The other thing that's different about the real world [compared to high school] is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together.
  • When those far removed from the creation of wealth -- undergraduates, reporters, politicians -- hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.
  • At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have zero.
  • Your teachers are always telling you [high school students] to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults.... Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time.
  • There's no switch inside you [high school students] that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.
  • It's not so important what you [high school students] work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
  • If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You [high school students] don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.
  • The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination [putting off important things to do unimportant things], because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.
  • If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real.
  • Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won't be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)
  • The first type of judgement is the type where judging you is the end goal... But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else.
  • One thing that leads us astray here is that the selector seems to be in a position of power. That makes him seem like a judge. If you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away. The author of a good novel wouldn't complain that readers were unfair for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. Stupid, perhaps, but not unfair.
  • If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.
  • Being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems.
  • Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean. We tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not meanness.
  • Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight.


  • I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it.

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