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Paul Graham
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Visit paulgraham.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Feb 2007 – Sep 2026
Tech Industry & Business 133Life, Learning & Writing 103Startups 77Society, Policy & Culture 66Career & Management 29Software Engineering 23
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Why Startup Hubs Work
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. Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide. I wondered about this for years. I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions…
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Organic Startup Ideas
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? There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than…
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Ramen Profitable
July 2009 Now that the term "ramen profitable" has become widespread, I ought to explain precisely what the idea entails. Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. This is a different form of profitability than startups have traditionally aimed for. Traditional…
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The New Funding Landscape
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. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations. The trends we've been seeing are…
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Be Relentlessly Resourceful
March 2009 A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays…
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The Future of Startup Funding
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 large amounts, and a large class of startups that need less than they used to. Increasingly, startups want a couple…
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Investor Herd Dynamics
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. When one investor wants to invest in you, that makes other investors want to, which makes others want to, and so on. Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly…
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How Y Combinator Started (2012)
On March 11 2005, Jessica and I were walking home from dinner in Harvard Square. Jessica was working at an investment bank at the time, but she didn't like it much, so she had interviewed for a job as director of marketing at a Boston VC fund. The VC fund was doing what now seems a comically familiar thing for a VC…
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Where to See Silicon Valley
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. But if you look, there are subtle signs you're in a place that's different from other places. 1. Stanford University Stanford is a strange…
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Mistakes That Kill Startups (2006)
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. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a…
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Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)
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.
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How to Make Wealth
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. That's been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word "startup" dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very…
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A Fundraising Survival Guide
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. But the second biggest cause of death is probably the difficulty of raising money. Fundraising is brutal. One reason it's so brutal is…
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Ideas for Startups (2005)
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. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups? That might seem a stupid thing to ask…
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High Resolution Fundraising
September 2010 The reason startups have been using more convertible notes in angel rounds is that they make deals close faster. By making it easier for startups to give different prices to different investors, they help them break the sort of deadlock that happens when investors all wait to see who else is going to…
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The Future of Web Startups
October 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.) There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper. It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there's some device that's very…
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