Top 22 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Graham

In the startup world, 'not working' is normal.

Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part.

One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies.

Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired.

It's hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn't yet been duplicated by technology.

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, like some student side project.

Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as 'suits'.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.

Some people just get what they want in the world.

For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.

You know your business model is broken when you're suing your customers.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

Startups often have to do dubious things.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

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.

If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.

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 they're selling 30.

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 you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

If you could replace high-school yearbooks, that could be a lot of money. It's so clearly waiting for someone to come along.

I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You'd think examples like that would be enough to convince people.

Like having a child, running a startup is the sort of experience that's hard to imagine unless you've done it yourself.