Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed

"If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy. And if you're not, a good economy won't save you. Someone who thinks 'I better not start a startup now, because the economy is...

"Customers don't care how hard you worked, only whether you solved their problems [and] raising money from investors is harder than selling to customers, because there are so few of them."
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"The way you succeed in most businesses is to be fanatically attentive to customers' needs. What are the odds that your own desires would coincide exactly with the demands of this powerful, externa...

"Maybe one day the most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won't matter where you live physically. But I wouldn't bet on it. The physical world is very high bandwidth, ...

"Of all the reasons we lie to kids, the most powerful is probably the same mundane reason they lie to us."
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"It was alarming to me how foreign it felt to sit in front of a computer that could only be used for work, because that showed how much time I must have been wasting."
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"From either direction we get to the same spot. If you start from successful startups, you find they often behaved like nonprofits. And if you start from ideas for nonprofits, you find they'd often...

"The reason there aren't more Googles is not that investors encourage innovative startups to sell out, but that they won't even fund them. Whoever the next Google is, they're probably being told ri...

"Everyone on the list [has] two qualities: they cared almost excessively about their work, and they were absolutely honest."
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"If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. So here's an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy."
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