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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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13 Nov, 1964

Paul Graham born in Weymouth, England

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Paul Graham is born in Weymouth, Dorset. The family moves to the U.S. and he grows up outside Pittsburgh, where his father works as a physicist designing nuclear reactors and his mother takes raises him and his sister. He starts writing computer code in high school, including a program to predict the flight path of model rockets.

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I’d tell him would be to stick his head up and look around.

1986

Graduates Cornell

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Graham graduates in the Class of ’86 with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, and a lot of experience in computer science:

What I learned from trying to study philosophy is that the place to look is in other fields.

On his decision to study computer science:

I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought I was one.

1991

Art school

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Graham enrolls in the Rhode Island School of Design in the summer, and in the fall takes classes at Florence’s Accademia di Belle Arti, a 500-year-old art school founded during the Renaissance.

I never cared about the official rules

Consulting and painting

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Graham takes temporary software development jobs, paints, and attends art school.

I was doing this thing where I would consult for a while and then run out of money and be in a panic.

1993

On Lisp

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Paul Graham On LispGraham publishes a study of advanced programming techniques using the language, with the theme of bottom-up programming.

Its examples form a library of functions and macros that readers will be able to use in their own Lisp programs.

24 Aug, 1995

Viaweb business plan

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ViaWeb LogoOriginally called Webgen, the company’s business plan outlines its idea to reduce costs by allowing users to develop their own online cataloge, and the idea of selling software rather than services:

Webgen’s generator can be used interactively by anyone with a modem and a copy of Netscape. This will lower the cost of putting a catalog online by, say, 90%. It also means that our volume is not limited by the number of clients we can serve personally. We would be a software company, not a service company.

1995

Programs in Lisp

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The program is one of the first commercial applications to use the language:

Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn’t see any reason not to trust our instincts and go with Lisp. We knew that everyone else was writing their software in C++ or Perl. But we also knew that that didn’t mean anything. If you chose technology that way, you’d be running Windows. When you choose technology, you have to ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will work the best.

Develops retailing software

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Graham and hacker Robert Morris, who know each other from Harvard, begin developing software for retailers.

Netscape was about to do this big IPO, and they had a huge PR campaign. Netscape was saying that people were going to buy and sell a lot of stuff online. So we thought, OK, we’ll write software for people to buy and sell things online.

They borrow $10,000 from lawyer Julian Weber, who is married to one of Graham’s painting teachers, and buy a Web server and started writing code.

It was one scary moment after another. We didn’t know what a term sheet meant or what a valuation was or that companies had boards of directors. All of those things just seemed like words we’d read in a newspaper.

Markets Viaweb

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With the product developed, Graham starts calling on potential customers, offering to set up and manage their online stores for $100 to $300 a month. Because Viaweb is a software program that runs inside a Web browser, he is able to continually respond to customer feedback.

We learned quickly by paying attention to the users.

Publishes ANSI Common Lisp

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Paul Graham ANSI LispGraham publishes a reference manual for the programming language, including a guide to optimization, macros, and an appendix on debugging.

Dec 1996

Viaweb has 70 clients

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Buyers for the software include major clients like Rolling Stone and International Male.

1997

Interest from Yahoo

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Viaweb’s client base is five times larger than a year earlier, and Yahoo starts showing interest in buying out Graham and Morris.

Early adopter of web search

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Graham is an early adopter of web search, recognizing the potential of search engines in 1997. Startup advisor and angel investor Ali Partovi:

Why did he and I see the importance of search when the search companies themselves didn’t? Because we had a unique advantage: context. We interacted daily with the folks that Yahoo didn’t even recognize as its customers yet: the small businesses that were dying to get listed on Yahoo search.

1998

Develops search algorithm

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Viaweb develops a search algorithm called Revenue Loop. Merchants bid a percentage of sales for traffic, and results are sorted by the bid multiplied by the average amount a user would buy. Graham:

Revenue Loop was the optimal sort for shopping search, in the sense that it sorted in order of how much money Yahoo would make from each link. But it wasn’t just optimal in that sense. Ranking search results by user behavior also makes search better. Users train the search: you can start out finding matches based on mere textual similarity, and as users buy more stuff the search results get better and better.

7 Jun, 1998

Yahoo buys Viaweb

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Yahoo issues 455,000 common shares in exchange for Viaweb, valuing the deal around $49 million. Viaweb now has 21 full-time employees at its Cambridge, Mass., headquarters. Graham says it was an early prototype for today’s startups:

The reason we know that it’s possible to start a start-up with about $10,000 and someone to help with the paperwork is because that’s exactly what we had.

1998

Works at Yahoo

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Graham moves to Yahoo after the buyout:

It felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing.

2000

Leaves Yahoo

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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.

2001

Begins working on Arc

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Graham and Morris begin working on the dialect of Lisp as the two main dialects of the programming language, Common Lisp and Scheme, have not substantially changed since the 1980s. He says in 1985, a language was a specification but now a good, free implementation is required along with large libraries and regular updates.

Another thing has changed since 1985: Unix won. So there is a lot more agreement now about what you can expect from the [operating system]. Common Lisp and Scheme date from a time when languages had to be OS-neutral.