Paul Graham Essays

November 2016 If you're a California voter, there is an important proposition on your ballot this year: Proposition 62, which bans the death penalty.

1993 (This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp .) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large.

After a link to Beating the Averages was posted on slashdot, some readers wanted to hear in more detail about the specific technical advantages we got from using Lisp in Viaweb.

April 2001, rev. April 2003 (This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.) In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called Viaweb .

April 2001 This essay developed out of conversations I've had with several other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious. It's not a critique of Java! It is a case study of hacker's radar.

May 2001 (This article was written as a kind of business plan for a new language .

May 2001 (These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.) 1. Programming Languages Are for People.

May 2001 (I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered.

September 2001 (This article explains why much of the next generation of software may be server-based, what that will mean for programmers, and why this new kind of software is a great opportunity...

December 2001 (rev. May 2002) (This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds .

There is a kind of mania for object-oriented programming at the moment, but some of the smartest programmers I know are some of the least excited about it.

February 2002 "...Copernicus' aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system....

Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes.

May 2002 "The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid.

May 2002 "We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp.

August 2002 (This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc .

January 2003 (This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting of NEPLS.

January 2003 (This article was given as a talk at the 2003 Spam Conference.

February 2003 When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity.

April 2003 (This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.) It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty.

May 2003 If Lisp is so great, why don't more people use it? I was asked this question by a student in the audience at a talk I gave recently. Not for the first time, either.

May 2003 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.

August 2003 We may be able to improve the accuracy of Bayesian spam filters by having them follow links to see what's waiting at the other end.

January 2004 Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked.

April 2004 To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected.

May 2004 (This essay was originally published in Hackers & Painters .) If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup.

May 2004 When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else.

July 2004 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.) A few months ago I finished a new book , and in reviews I keep noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.

August 2004 In a recent talk I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project.

September 2004 Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion.

September 2004 (This essay is derived from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.) I had a front row seat for the Internet Bubble, because I worked at Yahoo during 1998 and 1999.

October 2004 As E. B. White said, "good writing is rewriting." I didn't realize this when I was in school. In writing, as in math and science, they only show you the finished product.

November 2004 A lot of people are writing now about why Kerry lost.

November 2004, corrected June 2006 Occam's razor says we should prefer the simpler of two explanations.

November 2004 (This is a new essay for the Japanese edition of Hackers & Painters . It tries to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.

January 2005 (I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.

March 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.

March 2005 A couple months ago I got an email from a recruiter asking if I was interested in being a "technologist in residence" at a new venture capital fund.

March 2005 (Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.) Recently I've had several emails from computer science undergrads asking what to do in college.

March 2005 (In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes—23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting.

March 2005 All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks.

April 2005 This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups.

April 2005 "Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times .

May 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.) The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24.

August 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.) Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source.

August 2005 Thirty years ago, one was supposed to work one's way up the corporate ladder. That's less the rule now. Our generation wants to get paid up front.

August 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.) Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality.

October 2005 The first Summer Founders Program has just finished. We were surprised how well it went.

October 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. ) How do you get good ideas for startups ? That's probably the number one question people ask me.

November 2005 In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions.

November 2005 Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to reach the speed where you can shift...

November 2005 Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless.

December 2005 The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators.

January 2006 To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that.

March 2006, rev August 2009 Yesterday one of the founders we funded asked me why we started Y Combinator . Or more precisely, he asked if we'd started YC mainly for fun. Kind of, but not quite.

March 2006, rev August 2009 A couple days ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted a patent . It issued in 2003, but no one told me.

March 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at Google.) A few weeks ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted four patents .

April 2006, rev August 2009 Plato quotes Socrates as saying "the unexamined life is not worth living.

April 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 Startup School .) The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others.

May 2006 (This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.

May 2006 (This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.) Startups happen in clusters. There are a lot of them in Silicon Valley and Boston, and few in Chicago or Miami.

June 2006 (This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.) A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage.

July 2006 I've discovered a handy test for figuring out what you're addicted to. Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine.

July 2006 When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing.

August 2006, rev. April 2007, September 2010 In a few days it will be Demo Day, when the startups we funded this summer present to investors.

October 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.) Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school.

October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question.

December 2006 I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any better than anyone else's.

January 2007 (Foreword to Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work .) Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down.

February 2007 A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence.

March 2007 (This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.) We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates.

April 2007 A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo.

April 2007 There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there's a second much more common type of judgement where it isn't.

April 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2007 ASES Summit at Stanford.

May 2007 People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age.

July 2007 An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Should you take it? You're about to hire your first employee.

July 2007 I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have.

August 2007 A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on.

August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party.

September 2007 A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college.

September 2007 In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college. I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the less honorable was to shock people.

October 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.) There's something interesting happening right now.

October 2007 After the last talk I gave, one of the organizers got up on the stage to deliver an impromptu rebuttal. That never happened before.

February 2008 The fiery reaction to the release of Arc had an unexpected consequence: it made me realize I had a design philosophy.

February 2008 A user on Hacker News recently posted a comment that set me thinking: Something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this � the nastiness. ...

March 2008, rev May 2013 (This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure out what we do. Even though Y Combinator is now 3 years old, we're still trying to understand its implications.

March 2008, rev. June 2008 Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise.

March 2008 The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read.

April 2008 There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes. I'm not claiming this is a list of the n most admirable people.

April 2008 Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.

April 2008 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.) About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want.

May 2008 Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. There may also be a benefit to us.

Note: The strategy described at the end of this essay didn't work. It would work for a while, and then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet on my work computer.

May 2008 Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

July 2008 At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a talk in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way.

August 2008 Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want: most startups that die, die because they didn't do that.

October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded.

November 2008 One of the differences between big companies and startups is that big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes.

December 2008 For nearly all of history the success of a society was proportionate to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations.

December 2008 (I originally wrote this at the request of a company producing a report about entrepreneurship. Unfortunately after reading it they decided it was too controversial to include.

December 2008 A few months ago I read a New York Times article on South Korean cram schools that said Admission to the right university can make or break an ambitious young South Korean.

February 2009 I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument.

February 2009 One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy.

February 2009 Hacker News was two years old last week.

February 2009 A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask "How could we make something like that happen here?

March 2009 About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers.

March 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at AngelConf .) When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. Seven years later I still hadn't started.

March 2009 A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.

April 2009 Inc recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years.

April 2009 I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions, I'm going to risk making one.

April 2009 Om Malik is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal. The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients.

April 2009 Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined.

"...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.

July 2009 Now that the term "ramen profitable" has become widespread, I ought to explain precisely what the idea entails.

July 2009 The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them.

August 2009 Kate Courteau is the architect who designed Y Combinator's office. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects.

September 2009 Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed.

September 2009 I bet you the current issue of Cosmopolitan has an article whose title begins with a number. "7 Things He Won't Tell You about Sex," or something like that.

September 2009 Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it.

September 2009 When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention is to seem extra friendly. You smile and say "pleased to meet you," whether you are or not.

October 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.) I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded.

November 2009 I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.

April 2010 The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?

July 2010 I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas.

July 2010 What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors.

August 2010 Two years ago I wrote about what I called "a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup funding:" the growing disconnect between VCs, whose current business model requires them to invest...

August 2010 When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing.

September 2010 The reason startups have been using more convertible notes in angel rounds is that they make deals close faster.

October 2010 Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of place that has conspicuous monuments.

October 2010 After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil.

October 2010 (I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.) 1.

December 2010 I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android.

December 2010 Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round.

March 2011 Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable post about missing Airbnb .

August 2011 I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem without waiting for the government.

October 2011 If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude.

January 2012 A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site . I thought it might be interesting to look at one day.

January 2012 There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness .

January 2012 A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us.

March 2012 One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are.

March 2012 As a child I read a book of stories about a famous judge in eighteenth century Japan called Ooka Tadasuke. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop.

March 2012 Y Combinator's 7th birthday was March 11. As usual we were so busy we didn't notice till a few days after. I don't think we've ever managed to remember our birthday on our birthday.

March 2012 I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker.

April 2012 A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying . Her list seems plausible.

September 2012 I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing.

September 2012 A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup.

October 2012 One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends before most other people.

November 2012 The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.

June 2013 (This talk was written for an audience of investors.) Y Combinator has now funded 564 startups including the current batch, which has 53.

July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't.

August 2013 When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work.

August 2013 The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of course a recipe for exponential growth.

September 2013 Most startups that raise money do it more than once.

October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford.

November 2014 It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few. Meanness isn't rare.

December 2014 Many startups go through a point a few months before they die where although they have a significant amount of money in the bank, they're also losing a lot each month, and revenue...

December 2014 I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three.

December 2014 If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing confidence in our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience a belief survived, the less likely it would be false.

December 2014 American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US.

January 2015 Corporate Development, aka corp dev, is the group within companies that buys other companies. If you're talking to someone from corp dev, that's why, whether you realize it yet or not.

January 2015 My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors. He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want to do.

January 2015 No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it.

February 2015 One of the most valuable exercises you can try if you want to understand startups is to look at the most successful companies and explain why they were not as lame as they seemed when...

August 2015 If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com, you should probably change your name. The reason is not just that people can't find you.

August 2015 I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand something important: why it's safe for startup founders to be nice people.

October 2015 When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same.

October 2015 Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. Something comes over most people when they start writing.

October 2015 This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing anything about the applicant pool.

November 2015 A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on it had been a "one-man show." It's sadly common to read that sort of thing.

January 2016 One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized than it used to be.

January 2016 Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer.

January 2016 Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this.

April 2016 (This is a talk I gave at an event called Opt412 in Pittsburgh. Much of it will apply to other towns.

January 2017 Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take.

January 2017 People who are powerful but uncharismatic will tend to be disliked. Their power makes them a target for criticism that they don't have the charisma to disarm.

September 2017 The most valuable insights are both general and surprising. F = ma for example. But general and surprising is a hard combination to achieve.

November 2019 Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination.

November 2019 If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy.

December 2019 The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.

December 2019 I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored,...

December 2019 There are two distinct ways to be politically moderate: on purpose and by accident.

January 2020 (I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often surprised by the attention they get as their companies grow, but it applies equally to anyone who becomes famous.

January 2020 When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out. Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true. I constantly feel like a noob.

February 2020 What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be.

April 2020 I recently saw a video of TV journalists and politicians confidently saying that the coronavirus would be no worse than the flu.

July 2020 "Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

July 2020 One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism.

August 2020 Some politicians are proposing to introduce wealth taxes in addition to income and capital gains taxes.

October 2020 One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one.

November 2020 There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct.

December 2020 To celebrate Airbnb's IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb.

December 2020 As I was deciding what to write about next, I was surprised to find that two separate essays I'd been planning to write were actually the same.

December 2020 Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about startups. The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as "earnest.

February 2021 Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming. I didn't write essays.

March 2021 The secret curse of the nonprofit world is restricted donations. If you haven't been involved with nonprofits, you may never have heard this phrase before.

March 2021 I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it.

April 2021 Every year since 1982, Forbes magazine has published a list of the richest Americans.

April 2021 When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent,...

May 2021 Noora Health , a nonprofit I've supported for years, just launched a new NFT. It has a dramatic name, Save Thousands of Lives , because that's what the proceeds will do.

May 2021 There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly.

May 2021 Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people.

June 2021 A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he was working on.

June 2021 It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard. Anyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they chose not to do it.

August 2021 When people say that in their experience all programming languages are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about languages but about the kind of programming they've done.

October 2021 If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he was really smart.

November 2021 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.) When I was a kid, I'd have said there wasn't. My father told me so.

February 2022 Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test.

April 2022 One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy.

September 2022 I recently told applicants to Y Combinator that the best advice I could give for getting in, per word, was Explain what you've learned from users.

October 2022 If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're true by definition.

November 2022 Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent contradiction between being made of matter that behaves in a predictable way, and the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I...

November 2022 In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge.

January 2023 ( Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said.

October 2023 One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.

March 2024 Despite its title this isn't meant to be the best essay. My goal here is to figure out what the best essay would be like. It would be well-written, but you can write well about any topic.

March 2024 (This is a talk I gave to 14 and 15 year olds about what to do now if they might want to start a startup later. Lots of schools think they should tell students something about startups.

March 2024 I met the Reddits before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they were one of the reasons we started it.

July 2024 Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find something that does.

September 2024 At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they'd ever heard.

September 2024 There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no.

October 2024 I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.

January 2025 The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar.

March 2025 What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask before they learn not to ask big questions.

May 2025 There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right.

June 2025 An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But there are three different reasons people might not know something, and they yield three very different kinds of essays.

July 2010 When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it.

December 2019 Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young Augustine felt about living virtuously.

July 2023 If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.