Paul Graham Essays

Founder @ yCombinator

Read More

The latest theses, insights, and blog posts from Paul Graham Essays

Superlinear Returns

October 18, 2023

How to Do Great Work

July 02, 2023

How to Get New Ideas

January 25, 2023

The Need to Read

November 26, 2022

What You (Want to)* Want

November 15, 2022

Alien Truth

October 18, 2022

What I've Learned from Users

September 21, 2022

Heresy

April 11, 2022

Putting Ideas into Words

February 13, 2022

Beyond Smart

October 22, 2021

Weird Languages

August 28, 2021

The Airbnbs

July 05, 2021

How to Work Hard

June 30, 2021

A Project of One's Own

June 08, 2021

Fierce Nerds

May 19, 2021

Crazy New Ideas

May 06, 2021

How People Get Rich Now

April 13, 2021

Write Simply

March 11, 2021

Donate Unrestricted

March 08, 2021

What I Worked On

February 17, 2021

Earnestness

December 13, 2020

Billionaires Build

December 05, 2020

Programming Bottom-Up

November 28, 2020

Beating the Averages

November 28, 2020

Java's Cover

November 28, 2020

Being Popular

November 28, 2020

The Roots of Lisp

November 28, 2020

The Other Road Ahead

November 28, 2020

What Made Lisp Different

November 28, 2020

Taste for Makers

November 28, 2020

What Languages Fix

November 28, 2020

Succinctness is Power

November 28, 2020

Revenge of the Nerds

November 28, 2020

A Plan for Spam

November 28, 2020

Design and Research

November 28, 2020

Better Bayesian Filtering

November 28, 2020

Why Nerds are Unpopular

November 28, 2020

The Hundred-Year Language

November 28, 2020

If Lisp is So Great

November 28, 2020

Hackers and Painters

November 28, 2020

Filters that Fight Back

November 28, 2020

What You Can't Say

November 28, 2020

The Word "Hacker"

November 28, 2020

How to Make Wealth

November 28, 2020

Mind the Gap

November 28, 2020

Great Hackers

November 28, 2020

The Python Paradox

November 28, 2020

The Age of the Essay

November 28, 2020

What the Bubble Got Right

November 28, 2020

A Version 1.0

November 28, 2020

Bradley's Ghost

November 28, 2020

It's Charisma, Stupid

November 28, 2020

Made in USA

November 28, 2020

What You'll Wish You'd Known

November 28, 2020

How to Start a Startup

November 28, 2020

A Unified Theory of VC Suckage

November 28, 2020

Undergraduation

November 28, 2020

Writing, Briefly

November 28, 2020

Return of the Mac

November 28, 2020

The Submarine

November 28, 2020

Hiring is Obsolete

November 28, 2020

After the Ladder

November 28, 2020

Inequality and Risk

November 28, 2020

What I Did this Summer

November 28, 2020

Ideas for Startups

November 28, 2020

The Venture Capital Squeeze

November 28, 2020

How to Fund a Startup

November 28, 2020

Web 2.0

November 28, 2020

Good and Bad Procrastination

November 28, 2020

How to Do What You Love

November 28, 2020

Why YC

November 28, 2020

6,631,372

November 28, 2020

Are Software Patents Evil?

November 28, 2020

See Randomness

November 28, 2020

How to Be Silicon Valley

November 28, 2020

The Power of the Marginal

November 28, 2020

The Island Test

November 28, 2020

Copy What You Like

November 28, 2020

How to Present to Investors

November 28, 2020

A Student's Guide to Startups

November 28, 2020

How Art Can Be Good

November 28, 2020

Learning from Founders

November 28, 2020

Is It Worth Being Wise?

November 28, 2020

Why to Not Not Start a Startup

November 28, 2020

Microsoft is Dead

November 28, 2020

Two Kinds of Judgement

November 28, 2020

The Equity Equation

November 28, 2020

Stuff

November 28, 2020

How Not to Die

November 28, 2020

News from the Front

November 28, 2020

How to Do Philosophy

November 28, 2020

The Future of Web Startups

November 28, 2020

Why to Move to a Startup Hub

November 28, 2020

Trolls

November 28, 2020

A New Venture Animal

November 28, 2020

How to Disagree

November 28, 2020

Some Heroes

November 28, 2020

Why There Aren't More Googles

November 28, 2020

Be Good

November 28, 2020

Lies We Tell Kids

November 28, 2020

Disconnecting Distraction

November 28, 2020

Cities and Ambition

November 28, 2020

A Fundraising Survival Guide

November 28, 2020

The High-Res Society

November 28, 2020

After Credentials

November 28, 2020

Keep Your Identity Small

November 28, 2020

Startups in 13 Sentences

November 28, 2020

Why TV Lost

November 28, 2020

How to Be an Angel Investor

November 28, 2020

Relentlessly Resourceful

November 28, 2020

Five Founders

November 28, 2020

The Founder Visa

November 28, 2020

Why Twitter is a Big Deal

November 28, 2020

A Local Revolution?

November 28, 2020

Ramen Profitable

November 28, 2020

The Trouble with the Segway

November 28, 2020

The List of N Things

November 28, 2020

Post-Medium Publishing

November 28, 2020

Persuade xor Discover

November 28, 2020

What Startups Are Really Like

November 28, 2020

Apple's Mistake

November 28, 2020

Organic Startup Ideas

November 28, 2020

How to Lose Time and Money

November 28, 2020

The Top Idea in Your Mind

November 28, 2020

What Happened to Yahoo

November 28, 2020

High Resolution Fundraising

November 28, 2020

Where to See Silicon Valley

November 28, 2020

The New Funding Landscape

November 28, 2020

What We Look for in Founders

November 28, 2020

Tablets

November 28, 2020

Founder Control

November 28, 2020

Subject: Airbnb

November 28, 2020

The Patent Pledge

November 28, 2020

Why Startup Hubs Work

November 28, 2020

Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998

November 28, 2020

Schlep Blindness

November 28, 2020

A Word to the Resourceful

November 28, 2020

Defining Property

November 28, 2020

How Y Combinator Started

November 28, 2020

Writing and Speaking

November 28, 2020

The Top of My Todo List

November 28, 2020

Black Swan Farming

November 28, 2020

Startup = Growth

November 28, 2020

The Hardware Renaissance

November 28, 2020

How to Get Startup Ideas

November 28, 2020

Startup Investing Trends

November 28, 2020

Do Things that Don't Scale

November 28, 2020

How to Convince Investors

November 28, 2020

Investor Herd Dynamics

November 28, 2020

How to Raise Money

November 28, 2020

Before the Startup

November 28, 2020

Mean People Fail

November 28, 2020

The Fatal Pinch

November 28, 2020

How You Know

November 28, 2020

Don't Talk to Corp Dev

November 28, 2020

What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

November 28, 2020

The Ronco Principle

November 28, 2020

Change Your Name

November 28, 2020

Default Alive or Default Dead?

November 28, 2020

Write Like You Talk

November 28, 2020

A Way to Detect Bias

November 28, 2020

Jessica Livingston

November 28, 2020

The Refragmentation

November 28, 2020

Economic Inequality

November 28, 2020

Life is Short

November 28, 2020

The Risk of Discovery

November 28, 2020

Charisma / Power

November 28, 2020

General and Surprising

November 28, 2020

Novelty and Heresy

November 28, 2020

The Lesson to Unlearn

November 28, 2020

Having Kids

November 28, 2020

Fashionable Problems

November 28, 2020

The Two Kinds of Moderate

November 28, 2020

Haters

November 28, 2020

Being a Noob

November 28, 2020

How to Write Usefully

November 28, 2020

Coronavirus and Credibility

November 28, 2020

Orthodox Privilege

November 28, 2020

Modeling a Wealth Tax

November 28, 2020

Early Work

November 28, 2020

How to Think for Yourself

November 28, 2020