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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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30 Sep, 2014

Startups are counterintuitive

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Graham says in Lecture 3 of the Stanford course that startups are counterintuitive in many ways, including that many founders don’t know the mechanics of investing or fund raising. He says founders also can’t game the system:

They always want to know, since apparently the measure of success for a startup is fundraising, another noob mistake. They always want to know, what are the tricks for convincing investors? And we have to tell them the best way to convince investors is to start a startup that is actually doing well, meaning growing fast, and then simply tell investors so.

Lecture 3 - Before the Startup (Paul Graham)

24 Feb, 2014

Launch Festival 2014

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Graham gives the keynote speech, and talks about how a successful idea has to start with a small consumer base:

It’s impossible to make something that a large number of people want. You’ve got to find something that a small number of people want, a lot…you’ve got to know who those first users are and how to get them…you sit down with those 500 people and throw a huge party and make them super, super happy.

Launch Festival 2014: Keynote - Paul Graham, Y Combinator + Session 4 - Day 1

11 Mar, 2012

Pycon keynote speech

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Graham gives the keynote speech to Pycon, the annual conference of Python programmers. He later reworks the speech as an essay, Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas.

One of the more surprising things I’ve noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them.

He discusses seven ideas: A new search engine, replacing email, replacing universities, movie content on the net, the next Steve Jobs, bringing back Moore’s Law, and automated medical diagnosis.

Keynote: Paul Graham, YCombinator

2010

Startup School 2010 speech

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Graham talks about the limitations of the VC model:

VCs, if they can get it, want a third of your company…there is a critical constraint in the VCs model, which is they take a board seat.

He says this constrains their ability to launch funding rounds:

[It] limits VC companies to two ‘classic’ Series A seed fund deals per partner per year

19 Apr, 2008

Startup School 2008

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Graham tells the event that two pieces of advice for startups combined give an interesting result:

Make something people want, don’t worry too much about making money…you’ve got a description of a non-profit. When you get a weird result like this, either it’s a bug, or it’s a new discovery

He says Google and Craigslist are successful businesses that have been blurred the line between for-profit and charities – for instance Google ran no ads for the first year, and Craigslist doesn’t maximize its revenue but is amazingly successful and has high revenue-per-employee count:

Most startups would like to trade places with Craigslist

He says that Google behaves benevolently towards customers with money, and earns money that way, while in another example, targeting a problem like malaria could increase productivity in areas affected by the disease, also potentially earning money.

Paul Graham at Startup School 08

Mar 2005

How To Start A Startup talk

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Graham gives a talk at the Harvard Computer School in which he says successful startups need to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.

If there is one message I’d like to get across about startups, that’s it. There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve.