Paul Graham

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One reason Starcloud has been so successful at fundraising is that it's a bet on launch costs decreasing, and that's like betting on Moore's Law in the 1990s. 1 Sept
No credential will get you more credibility with investors than growth. And if you do it well enough, you won't need investors at all. 1 Sept
This is a great example of what I call the "YC GDP". It's not just founders using one another's products during the batch. In a few years, Stoke's reusable lau… 1 Sept
Prediction: Nox is going to be a big deal. They're growing at software growth rates shipping metal. And Zane is one of the most committed CEOs I've met in the… 1 Sept
These guys are from just down the road from where the Collisons came from, so office hours with them had a lot of deja vu. 31 Aug
One way I knew LLMs themselves were a big deal was that the people most surprised by what they could do were the insiders. 31 Aug
A dedicated fan at the UVA-NC State game. (It was a blowout. UVA won 34-8.) 31 Aug
Something I told 14 yo: You have to be able to throw stuff away to do great work. You never get so good that you get everything right the first time. You have… 30 Aug
Is this plane in ground effect off the roof of the stadium? 30 Aug
Strange as it sounds, YC wants companies it rejects to succeed. Otherwise we won't know if we reject someone good. 30 Aug
Founders' reputation for overconfidence is sample bias; most good startups actually underrate themselves. 26 Aug
The best thing a 17-year-old could do today is learn to build LLMs from scratch and train the most powerful ones they can get hardware for. 23 Aug
Blocking data center construction in America would not slow the rate of AI progress, only the rate of AI progress in America. 22 Aug
In ten years few people will be able to write, or want to read, anything longer than a page or two — and the few who still can will be powerful. 21 Aug
The way to win at capitalism is to make customers' lives better rather than to squeeze them, because creating new things returns 10x where squeezing returns 2x at best. 21 Aug
One reliable tell of AI writing is excessively colorful verbs where a normal person would use a plain one. 19 Aug
Economic inequality is growing because technology makes companies easier to start and faster to grow, not because of tax policy. 16 Aug
Founding alone is still a bad idea even though AI lets one person get more done, because the point of a cofounder is to share the stress. 14 Aug
Almost all standard startup advice is still true in the AI era. 12 Aug
If AI turns the world upside down, the safest place to be is a small, fast-moving company that can change direction easily. 12 Aug
Intelligence is becoming a choice rather than a byproduct of daily work: there will still be smart people, but only those who choose to be. 1 Oct 2024
Because writing is thinking, a world divided into writers and non-writers becomes a world divided into thinkers and non-thinkers. 1 Oct 2024
Within a couple of decades there will not be many people who can write, because AI has removed the pressure to learn. 1 Oct 2024
Returns for performance are superlinear rather than proportional across most domains that matter. 1 Oct 2023