Paul Graham Quotes

15 quotes in 187 categories

• I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.
• Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too…
• For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.
• If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if…
• If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.
• When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea,…
• There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.
• Some people just get what they want in the world.
• Startups often have to do dubious things.
• Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired.
• One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies.
• A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.
• Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as 'suits'.
• Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part.
• We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now…

Browse Paul Graham Quotes by Category