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Paul Graham

Paul Graham87 posts

Paul Graham is a computer programmer, essayist, and venture capitalist, born in 1964. He is a co-founder of Viaweb, which later became Yahoo Store. His writing includes essays on the programming language Lisp, being a nerd in high school, and the hypothetical programming language Blub. He has published three books, including a collection of essays titled Hackers And Painters. He is one of the creators of the startup incubator Y Combinator and the social news site Hacker News. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting in Italy. He is married to Jessica Livingston.

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29 May, 2014

Steps down from Hacker News

Quits Job0 Comments

Graham announces that he is stepping down from his day-to-day role at the site. Kat Manalac and Garry Tan will be take over responding to individual comments, and others will be responsible for design, code and community management.

I’ll still be around as a user, but less frequently than when I felt I had to check the site every hour or so to make sure nothing had broken.

21 Feb, 2014

Y Combinator leadership change

Quits Job0 Comments

paul-graham-steps-down-sam-altmanGraham announces that he is stepping down from his day-to-day role, and Altman will take over.

It has nothing to do with the current startup environment. I started trying to recruit Sam to take over back in 2012…I’m just not much good at running the sort of (comparatively) large organization YC is going to have to become.  Sam will be much better at that.

He will stay on as an advisor and will work with startups at Office Hours.

2000

Leaves Yahoo

Quits Job0 Comments

Graham leaves Yahoo after spending one and a half years working on Yahoo Store, the new iteration of Viaweb. He says the company lacked a clear vision, and was somewhere between a tech company and a media company:

Project managers at Yahoo were called “producers,” for example, and the different parts of the company were called “properties.” But what Yahoo really needed to be was a technology company, and by trying to be something else, they ended up being something that was neither here nor there. That’s why Yahoo as a company has never had a sharply defined identity.