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Paul Graham

Paul Graham88 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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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.

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.

1991

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.

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

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.

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.