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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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22 Feb, 2011

Entrepreneur interview

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Graham tells the magazine that startup ideas are often bad, and investing in them is investing in people. He says knowing the business and being concise also help. The most important quality Y Combinator looks for:

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.

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

20 Oct, 2010

Forbes cover

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Paul Graham Forbes coverGraham appears on the front cover of Forbes magazine, and is profiled in an article as The Disruptor in the Valley.

We didn’t mean to invent this new model. It all happened by accident.

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.

10 Feb, 2010

Mixergy interview

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Graham talks about starting Y Combinator and funding early participants like Reddit.

That very first summer, I mean, the reason we decided to invest in start ups in batches, all at once, was because we didn’t know what we were doing … For both the hirers and the employees, summer jobs are kind of like a throwaway thing. So, we thought, well, as long as everybody treats summer jobs as a throwaway thing, we’ll have this summer program, and if it turns out to be a disaster, no one will blame us.

10 Jul, 2009

Revenue Bootcamp interview

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Graham and Sequoia Capital’s Moritz are interviewed by Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures about how founders need to have a passion to succeed. At one point in the chat, asked what the next big wave of inventions will be, Graham says it’s hard to define, but a good way to tell where innovations will come is to look at the products people in the tech industry are using:

Look at the ones hackers themselves use….we [Y Combinator] have a ton of companies building stuff for the iPhone now because all of them use iPhones, not one is building stuff for Blackberries

Fireside Chat: Money and passion

4 Jun, 2009

Mixergy interview

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Ohanian talks about how Y Combinator helped shape the idea for Reddit in the early stages:

We approached Y Combinator … with an idea that would transform the way you order food, specifically using a cell phone to do so.  They didn’t really like the idea.  They liked us, but they hated the idea.

They still didn’t have a firm idea, but sat down with Graham and talked about a site that would filter the most interesting web content.

…it was in that conversation with Paul where we developed this idea for creating a way to find out what’s new online.

The idea morphed into the final product:

All the actual mechanics of how that would work, basically happened in the next few weeks, while Steve [Huffman] and I were in a crap apartment, in Bedford, Massachusetts, playing a lot of Warcraft.

30 Apr, 2009

Altman in founders list

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Graham lists Altman as one of the five founders he considers most interesting, along with Steve Jobs, TJ Rodgers, Page and Brin, and Buchheit.

On questions of design, I ask “What would Steve do?” but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask “What would [Altman] do?”

Jan 2009

AirBNB joins Y Combinator

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paul-graham-airbnbThe vacation rental company is accepted into the winter batch and receives $20,000 in funding. Chesky, Gebbia and Blecharczyk sell 800 boxes of Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain cereal they designed themselves, raising $30,000 in seed capital, which is what  convinces the firm to let them in the program. Graham:

When we funded Airbnb, we thought it was too crazy. We couldn’t believe large numbers of people would want to stay in other people’s places. We funded them because we liked the founders so much. As soon as we heard they’d been supporting themselves by selling Obama and McCain branded breakfast cereal, they were in.

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

2007

Funds Justin.tv

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Graham funds Kan and Shear’s second venture, Justin.tv, supplying $50,000 through Y Combinator. The website featues a single channel tracking Kan, who wears a camera on his head and a backpack full of cellphone modems, as he goes about life in San Francisco. It attracts tens of thousands of viewers. Graham:

I thought it was insanely weird.

Dropbox joins Y Combinator

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paul-graham-dropboxThe file hosting service joins the summer 2007 intake. Graham tells Houston to find a co-founder within two weeks, and he connects with Arash Ferdowsi just in time to make the cut. (Original application here.) Houston:

It was the way for someone who is not from the Valley get context for what you need to know. Most of the world did not grow up in Silicon Valley … so you’re kind of on the outside.

21 Mar, 2007

Police raid Justin.tv

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Police raid Kan’s North Beach apartment after a spoof call from the channel’s official cellphone number, which is posted on the website.

Justin.tv gets raided by the police

Feb 2007

Starts Hacker News

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Graham creates the news aggregator to sharpen the use of Arc on applications. It is initially called Startup News, and gets around 1,600 daily uniques as potential Y Combinator founders discuss pitch ideas. Graham:

There are a number of Reddit users that I know only by their usernames, but I know must be smart from the things they’ve written. We’re counting on the same phenomenon to help us decide who to fund.

2 Oct, 2006

Techcrunch interview

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Graham says his favorite startups don’t necessarily make the most money, but destroy monopolies. He says collaborative news sites have changed the media landscape, and he would like to see a startup take on the record industry, while the way to beat Google is to develop something that their programmers aren’t allowed to do at work, like a video service.

The easiest way to make something people want is to make something you want. What do you wish existed that doesn’t?

31 Dec, 2005

Boondoggle Films interview

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Graham is interviewed about hacker culture and starting Y Combinator for the 12 Weeks With Geeks documentary. On the success of the tech industry:

I think a lot of people who got involved with computers early on had no idea what they were going to do with them

2005

First Y Combinator batch

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The program receives 227 applications, mostly from computer science students, and invests in eight start-ups. The first intake includes Reddit, Loopt, which develops software for cellphone users to see where their friends are, and Kiko, a calender software provider created by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear.

Y Combinator starts

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ycombinator-logoGraham, Livingston, Morris, and Viaweb employee Trevor Blackwell offer $6,000 seed capital for a company with one founder, $12,000 if the company has two founders, and $18,000 if the company has three. In exchange, Y Combinator gets around 6% in common stock. Graham publicizes the program on the web:

We give you enough money to live on for a summer, as with a regular summer job. But instead of working for an existing company, you’ll be working for your own; instead of showing up at some office building at 9 a.m., you can work when and where you like; and instead of salary, the money you get will be seed funding.