Paul Graham Quotations

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as 'suits'.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies.

I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You'd think examples like that would be enough to convince people.

For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.

It's hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn't yet been duplicated by technology.

There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.

You know your business model is broken when you're suing your customers.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

If you could replace high-school yearbooks, that could be a lot of money. It's so clearly waiting for someone to come along.

If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.

In the startup world, 'not working' is normal.

Like having a child, running a startup is the sort of experience that's hard to imagine unless you've done it yourself.

We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30.

Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project.

Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part.

Some people just get what they want in the world.

So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.

She was the type of person you just felt was going to succeed in whatever she did. She was quite lively and outgoing.

Nerds just don't happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as prophylactic measure against stupidity.

There are several reasons that sponsors come to these events. Advertising. Exposure. To attract people to their product and interaction with other businesses.

It is clear that a substantial section of the public believes what she did was undermining good governance, irrespective of the rights and wrongs of this particular case. This suggests the presidency will have to reformulate the guidelines in an appropriate manner.

I think he still loves the game. That's what coach does. He's a coach, 100 percent. He could conceivably come back. I don't think coach has lost any of his competitive fire.

We hope to be up and running by September.

There are all these great programmers out there who think starting a startup requires esoteric business knowledge,

To be fair, pros come out. They wear shorts. They have a good time. A lot of times if the guest hits a good drive, the pro will just say: 'Let's go.' It's just fun.

These last games are the most important. We want to be at the top, not at the bottom.

The Summer Founders Program fixes the common problem with working at a startup, which is that it's very lonely. You do nothing but work and sleep and no one understands the situation you are in, and friends don't know why it takes three days for you to call them back.

Then I said jokingly, but not entirely jokingly, 'But not from me,' and everyone's faces fell, ... Afterwards, I had dinner with some of these guys and they seemed amazingly competent and I thought, 'You know, these guys probably could start companies.'

In both painting and hacking there are some tasks that are terrifyingly ambitious, and others that are comfortably routine. It's a good idea to save some easy tasks for moments when you would otherwise stall.

In previous elections, we've had voting stations overrun by panicky mobs, and there's been a bit more obvious intimidation.