Paul Graham Essays

✅ If you want to start a startup, do it. Starting a startup is not the greatest mystery. It seems from the outside. It's not something you have to know about "business" to do. Build something users love and spend less than you make. How hard is that? News From the Front It genuinely doesn’t matter which college you go to. What matters is what you make of yourself. Your job isn’t to get good grades so you can get into a good college, but to learn and do. What matters most in college is the people you surround yourself with. Find smart friends and learn from them. Startups are informal and there’s always too much to do. If you just start doing stuff, people are often too busy to shoo you away. You can work your way into their confidence, and maybe turn it into an official job later. Undergraduation The best thing you can do in college is figure out what you truly like. College is where faking stops working. From here, unless you want to go work for a big company (like reverting to high school), the only way forward is doing what you love. You must be genuinely interested in the topic you are studying. The worthwhile departments, in my opinion, are math, the hard sciences, engineering, history (especially economic and social history, and history of science), architecture, and the classics. One of the best things to do in college is to choose a hard technical problem, and solve it. Another way to be good at programming is to find other people who are good at it, and learn what they know. Programmers sort themselves into tribes, and some tribes are smarter than others. Look around and see what the smart people are working on. There’s usually a reason. What You’ll Wish You’d Known The graduation speech approach says: pick where you want to be in 20 years, then ask what to do now. Instead, don’t commit to the future. Look at the options now, and choose the ones that give you the most promising range of options later. It’s not so important what you work on, as long as you’re not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, then decide later which options you’ll take. Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people clump together, but faking makes it hard to spot. Find the real clumps. The best protection is to be working on hard problems. Hard means worry. If you’re not worrying it will come out badly, or that you won’t understand what you’re studying, it isn’t hard enough. There has to be suspense. Treat school as a day job. It’s pretty sweet. You’re done at 3, and you can even work on your own stuff while you’re there. One of the most dangerous illusions from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. It takes years to articulate good questions. They congeal from experience. Don’t hunt for big ideas. Put time into work that interests you, keep your mind open, and a big idea can take roost. Don’t worry if a project doesn’t look like it’s on the path to some goal you’re supposed to have. Paths bend more than you think. The important thing is being excited about it, because that’s how you learn. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn. The best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great ideas are such outliers that your conscious mind rejects them as company ideas. You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss Founders and early startup employees are like the Birkenstock wearing weirdos at Berkeley. Tiny minority, but living as humans are meant to. Only extremists live naturally. The ideal human group is 8 people. One friend wanted to start a startup after college but went to Google to learn more as a programmer. He realized he was wrong. In another essay, I advised graduating seniors to work for a couple years at another company before starting their own. I’d modify that now. Work for another company if you want to, but only if it’s a small one, and if you want to start your own startup, go ahead. The best advice I can offer is that if you have a taste for genuinely interesting problems, indulging it energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup. And indeed, probably also the best way to live. How to Work Hard There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three. Since you can’t really change how much natural talent you have, in practice doing great work reduces to working hard. What I learned as a kid is how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You’ll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things. There are two separate kinds of fakeness you need to learn to discount in order to understand what real work is. 1) Subjects get distorted when they’re adapted to be taught by schools, often so distorted that they’re nothing like the work done by actual practitioners. 2) Some types of work are bogus. There’s a kind of solidarity to real work. It all feels necessary. Once you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how many hours a day to spend on it. You can’t solve this by working every waking hour because in many kinds of work, there’s a point beyond which quality declines. That limit varies. His limit for harder writing or programming is about five hours a day. When he was running a startup, he could work all the time. The only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Honesty is critical both ways: notice when you’re lazy, but also when you’re working too hard. And if you think there’s something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. Finding the limit is constant and ongoing, not something you do just once. Trying hard doesn’t mean constantly pushing yourself to work. You push occasionally when starting a project or when you hit some sort of check. That’s when procrastination shows up. But once you get rolling, you tend to keep going. A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can. As a kid, you get the impression that everyone has a calling and all they have to do is figure out what it is. This is simply not true. If you’re working hard but not getting good results, you should switch. The best test of whether it’s worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting. Working hard is not just a dial you turn up. It’s a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see what kind you’re best suited for, aim close to the core, judge what you’re capable of and how you’re doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming quality. This network is too complicated to trick. But if you’re consistently honest and clear, it will assume an optimal shape, and you’ll be productive in a way few people are. A Students Guide to Startups It’s perfectly okay to start a startup while in college. Sam Altman started his first the summer of his junior year. Y Combinator’s policy now is only to fund undergrads they can’t talk out of starting a startup. If you’re unsure about starting one in college, it’s best to wait. Startup opportunities have only increased with time. If you ask why not wait longer, work or grad school might be a good idea. If he had to pick the sweet spot for startup founders, he'd say mid-twenties. As a young founder, your strengths are stamina, poverty, rootlessness, colleagues, and ignorance. Stamina matters. I can’t think of any successful startups whose founders worked 9 to 5. Younger founders need longer hours because they’re probably not as efficient as they’ll be later. Most startups end up doing something different than they planned. The way the successful ones find something that works is by trying things that don’t. The worst thing you can do is have a rigid plan and then start spending a lot of money to implement it. Better to operate cheaply and give your ideas time to evolve. You must live cheaply and it's better not to have things tying you down like a mortgage. Even more important than living cheaply is thinking cheaply. One reason the Apple II was so popular was that it was cheap. It was cheap and used cheap off-the-shelf peripherals because Woz designed it for himself, and he couldn't afford more. You must be willing to move. Most startups end up moving cities. Places that aren’t startup hubs are toxic. You can tell how hard it is to start a startup in Houston or Chicago or Miami from the microscopically small number per capita that succeed there. Successful startups are almost never started by one person. Usually they begin with a conversation: someone says something would be a good company, and a friend says “Yeah, that is a good idea, let’s try it.” If you’re missing that second person, the startup never happens. Undergrads have an edge because they’re surrounded by people willing to say that. At a good college, ambitious technical people are concentrated more than you’ll ever be again. Many students feel they should wait and get more experience. Often they should. But all other things are not as equal as they look. Most students don't realize how rich they are in the scarcest startup ingredient: co-founders. If you wait too long, your friends may be involved in something they don't want to abandon. The better they are, the more likely. Some classmates will be successful founders. So which ones? Look for people who are not just smart, but incurable builders. People who keep starting projects and finish at least some. Above all else, above academic credentials and even the idea, we look for people who build things. The best place to work if you want to start a startup is probably a startup. Every institution was at one point a handful of people in a room, deciding to start something. Institutions are made up, and made up by people no different from you. Once you get over a certain threshold of intelligence, the deciding factor for founder success is how much you want to. You don’t have to be that smart. If you’re not a genius, start a startup in an unsexy field with less competition. Ignorance can help you discover new ideas. Woz said: "All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before ever. Every single thing that we came out with was really great; I never once done that thing in my life." What goes wrong with founders? They build class projects. Two big things missing: an iterative definition of a real problem and intensity. In a startup, implementation is used to refine the idea. Often the only value of the first six months is proving your initial idea was mistaken. That’s valuable. If you’re free of a misconception everyone shares, you’re in a powerful position. Users just want your software to do what they need, otherwise you get a zero. That’s one of the biggest differences between school and the real world: there is no reward for good effort. Work experience teaches what work is and how intrinsically horrible it is. The brutal equation: you spend most waking hours doing what someone else wants or starve. To the average undergrad, getting rich means Ferraris or admiration. To someone who understands money and work, it means opting out of the brutal equation that governs 99.9% of lives. That understanding makes you work much harder. You don’t get money for working, you get money for doing things other people want. That pushes you toward users. You can also learn skills that are useful in a startup. That can be different from job skills. Thinking about getting a job makes you learn languages employers want. In a startup you pick the language. The key founder skill isn’t a programming technique. It’s understanding users and giving them what they want. Get into the habit of thinking about users: what do they want? What would make them say wow? Before the Startup If you’re thinking about getting involved with someone as cofounder, employee, investor, or acquirer and you have misgivings, trust your gut. If someone seems lame, bogus, or a jerk, don’t ignore it. It’s not that important to know a lot about startups. The way to succeed is not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users and solve problems for them. Starting a startup is where gaming systems stops working. There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about is whether your product does what they want. If you want to start a startup one day, what should you do in college? You need an idea and cofounders. The M.O. for getting both is the same. The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. They’ll be bad and plausible sounding, which wastes time. Instead, take a step back and turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without conscious effort, so unconsciously you don’t even notice at first that they’re startup ideas. How: Learn a lot about things that matter Work on problems that interest you With people you like and respect The optimal thing to do in college if you want to be a successful founder is not a new vocational version of college focused on entrepreneurship. It’s the classic version of college as education for its own sake. Learn powerful things. If you have genuine intellectual curiosity, that’s what you’ll naturally do if you follow your inclinations. What matters in entrepreneurship is domain expertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert on search. The way to become an expert on search was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not ulterior motives. Ultimate advice for young founders: just learn. How to Start a Startup You need three things to create a powerful startup: start with good people, make something customers want, spend as little money as possible. Most failed startups fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed. Hard but doable. There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve. Work on stuff you like with people you like during college. Ideally two to four founders. Too many founders and it looks like a group photo. The more you have, the worse disagreements you’ll have. In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn’t want the product. If you wish to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers first. At this stage, most investors expect a brief description of what you plan to do, how you’ll make money, and the resumes of the founders. Have founders sign an agreement saying their ideas belong to the company. Also ask if they signed any other contracts. Basically, VCs are the source of money. He’d go with whoever offered the most money, the soonest, with the least attached. Listen to the first couple customers. They are usually smart and tell you how to make a winning product. They had office chairs so cheap the arms fell off. Embarrassing then, but in retrospect the grad student atmosphere was another thing they did right without knowing it. They felt like impudent underdogs instead of corporate stuffed shirts, and that is the spirit you want. Apartments tend to be better locations than office buildings. The productivity key is people coming back after dinner. Those hours after the phone stops ringing are the best for getting work done. Great things happen when a group goes to dinner, talks ideas, then comes back to implement. Once a company shifts into everyone driving home to the suburbs for dinner, you lose something valuable. The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people. He’s an extremist: hiring is the worst thing a company can do. It pushes you into uncool office buildings that make your software worse. You need to see what it's like in an existing business before you try running your own. Negative lessons: don't have a lot of meetings, don't have chunks of code multiple people own, don't have a sales guy running the company, don't make a high-end product, don't let your code get too big, don't leave bugs to QA, don't go too long between releases, don't isolate developers from users. During this time you work a lot because when you’re not working, your competitors will be. Leisure was running and about 15 minutes of reading a night. Every couple weeks he’d take a few hours off to visit a used bookshop or go to a friend’s house for dinner. He visited family twice. Otherwise he just worked.