Paul Graham Quotes & Sayings

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

“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.”

“For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.”

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

“There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”