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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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9 Oct, 2014

Responds to valuation critics

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Graham responds to criticism that being a Y Combinator alum gains companies twice the valuation they would have had without participating. He tells Bloomberg Television’s Studio 1.0 with Emily Chang:

That means we can take people into YC, and even if we did nothing else, they would be able to get twice the valuation they would have otherwise. Either the company’s worth a lot or it’s not. If it’s worth a lot, then it was a bargain anyway, even if it was overpriced. And if the company ends up tanking, who cares how much you paid for this now worthless stock, right?

Dec 2013

Women in tech clarification

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Graham clarifies his remarks about women in tech, saying that the article was stitched together from a conversation and published as an interview:

I didn’t say women can’t be taught to be hackers. I said [Y Combinator] can’t do it in 3 months.
I didn’t say women haven’t been programming for 10 years. I said women who aren’t programmers haven’t been programming for 10 years. I didn’t say people can’t learn to be hackers later in life. I said people cannot at any age learn to be hackers simultaneously with starting a startup whose thesis derives from insights they have as hackers.

31 Dec, 2013

Women in tech remark

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After a comment he made in a TheInformation interview about how fewer women lead tech startups receives press coverage, transcripts show that Graham’s remarks focused on getting students interested in programming from a younger age to involve more women in the industry, something he says will take time to achieve:

What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum.

28 Sep, 2010

Responds to Angelgate

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Graham responds to the controversy by detailing what Y Combinator does. He doesn’t directly address Angelgate but says that he ‘realized recently that a lot of people don’t understand very well’ what the firm does. He describes the funding cycles and Demo Days, and includes feedback from one founder:

Most of the practical advice is redundant, but there’s value in it even as such—if you hear the same things over and over again from different angles, especially from prominent people, it tends to sink in more.