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Naval Podcast Apple Email <LOCATION> YouTube Aug 6 2025 We talked about in the past how "Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true." And <PERSON> made a song out of it. <PERSON> , God bless him. And I think that's absolutely true. More Aug 3 2025 We're hiring an editor ... | naval | for-profit | 0.95 | 653 | {
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<PERSON> New: Good Writing | Founder <PERSON> to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . © mmxxv pg | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.11 | 20 | {
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Arc Arc is a new dialect of Lisp we're working on. You can find an early release and ask questions at <URL> . The Arc community is very newbie-friendly, because all the users are newbies to some extent. To get an idea of where we eventually hope to take <PERSON>, see Being Popular and The Hundred-Year Language . Forum ... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.47 | 94 | {
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<LOCATION> <DATE_TIME> <LOCATION> is a spec for a new dialect of Lisp, written in itself. This should sound familiar to people who know about Lisp's origins, because it's the way Lisp began . It consists of two text files meant to be read in parallel: a guide to the Bel language , and the <PERSON> source . For those wh... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.595 | 118 | {
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Lisp The Roots of Lisp What Made Lisp Different A Lisp Startup Arc: A New Lisp Lisp Code Lisp Links Lisp History Lisp Quotes Lisp FAQ | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.13 | 26 | {
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Spam A Plan for Spam Plan for Spam FAQ Better Bayesian Filtering So Far, So Good Filters that Fight Back Will Filters Kill Spam? Stopping Spam Spam is Different Filters vs. Blacklists The Destiny of Blacklists Getting Past Filters Spam Conference Filtering Research Spam Resources Spam Archives Spam Links | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.245 | 49 | {
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Responses "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." <PERSON> Founders' Accents What I Didn't Say Female Founders "I can be tricked by anyone who looks like <PERSON>." | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.2 | 38 | {
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FAQs General FAQ Programming FAQ Startup FAQ Arc FAQ Lisp FAQ Viaweb FAQ Plan for Spam FAQ FFB FAQ | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.0475 | 19 | {
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RAQs These are questions that I've only been asked once or twice, but which seem especially interesting. Why don't more painters have hacking jobs? Probably for the same reason that few hackers take up painting. They both seem from the outside like great abstruse mysteries. You can learn great abstruse mysteries as a t... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 978 | {
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<PERSON> is a programmer, writer, and investor. In <DATE_TIME>, he and <PERSON> started <PERSON>, the first software as a service company. <PERSON> was acquired by Yahoo in <DATE_TIME>, where it became Yahoo Store. In <DATE_TIME> he started publishing essays on <URL> , which now gets around 25 million page views per ye... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.86 | 165 | {
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Having Kids <DATE_TIME> Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about kids the way the young <PERSON> felt about living virtuously. I'd have been sad to think I'd never have children. But did I want them now? No. If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since I was a... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,527 | {
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How to <PERSON> and Money <DATE_TIME> When we sold our startup in <DATE_TIME> I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a l... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 665 | {
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The Shape of the Essay Field <DATE_TIME> An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But there are three different reasons people might not know something, and they yield three very different kinds of essays. One reason people won't know something is if it's not important to know. That doesn't mean i... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 776 | {
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Good Writing <DATE_TIME> There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about important things. It might seem as if these two kinds of good would be unrelated, like the speed of a car and the colo... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,653 | {
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What to Do <DATE_TIME> What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it myself in the process of investigating something else. But once I did, I thought I should at least t... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,594 | {
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Writes and Write-Nots October 2024 I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in <DATE_TIME> there won't be many people who can write. One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many peop... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 551 | {
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When To Do What You Love <DATE_TIME> There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no. Sometimes you should and sometimes you shouldn't, but the border between should and shouldn't is very complicated. The only way to give ... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,559 | {
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The Reddits <DATE_TIME> I met the <NRP> before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they were one of the reasons we started it. YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (the undergrad computer club) about how to start a startup. Everyone else in the audience was probably local, but <PERSON> and <PE... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,143 | {
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The Best Essay March 2024 Despite its title this isn't meant to be the best essay. My goal here is to figure out what the best essay would be like. It would be well-written, but you can write well about any topic. What made it special would be what it was about. Obviously some topics would be better than others. It pro... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 4,374 | {
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How to Get New Ideas January 2023 ( Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. This is what I would have said.) The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strang... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.765 | 153 | {
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The Need to Read November 2022 In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer. That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just b... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 467 | {
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What You (Want to)* Want <DATE_TIME> Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent contradiction between being made of matter that behaves in a predictable way, and the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I wanted. At the time I had a self-interested motive for exploring the question. At that age (like m... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 521 | {
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Alien Truth <DATE_TIME> If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're true by definition. Ditto for the truths of physics; the mass of a carbon atom would be the same on their planet. But I think we... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 679 | {
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Putting Ideas into Words <DATE_TIME> Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. An... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,176 | {
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Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste? <DATE_TIME> (This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.) When I was a kid, I'd have said there wasn't. My father told me so. Some people like some things, and other people like other things, and who's to say who's right? It seemed so obvious that there was no such thi... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,129 | {
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Weird Languages <DATE_TIME> When people say that in their experience all programming languages are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about languages but about the kind of programming they've done. 99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions. All popular languages are e... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 346 | {
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A Project of One's Own June 2021 <DATE_TIME>, on the way home from school, my <DATE_TIME> son told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he was working on. This made me as happy as anything I've heard him say - not just because he was excited about his story, but because he'd discovered this way of... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 2,513 | {
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Fierce Nerds <DATE_TIME> Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinary social situations they are - as quiet and diffident as the star quarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physics symposium. And for the same reason: they are fish out of water. But the apparent diffidence of n... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,252 | {
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An NFT That Saves Lives <DATE_TIME> Noora Health , a nonprofit I've supported for <DATE_TIME>, just launched a new NFT. It has a dramatic name, Save Thousands of Lives , because that's what the proceeds will do. <PERSON> has been saving lives for <DATE_TIME>. They run programs in hospitals in <LOCATION> to teach new mo... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 318 | {
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The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty <DATE_TIME> When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether more death sentences are given to some groups than others. But in pr... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 769 | {
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How People Get Rich Now <DATE_TIME> since <DATE_TIME>, Forbes magazine has published a list of the richest <NRP>. If we compare the 100 richest people in <DATE_TIME> to the 100 richest in <DATE_TIME>, we notice some big differences. In <DATE_TIME> the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest peo... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 2,554 | {
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Write Simply <DATE_TIME> I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas. And the further they'll read.... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 512 | {
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Donate Unrestricted <DATE_TIME> The secret curse of the nonprofit world is restricted donations. If you haven't been involved with nonprofits, you may never have heard this phrase before. But if you have been, it probably made you wince. Restricted donations mean donations where the donor limits what can be done with t... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 487 | {
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Billionaires Build <DATE_TIME> As I was deciding what to write about next, I was surprised to find that two separate essays I'd been planning to write were actually the same. The first is about how to ace your Y Combinator interview. There has been so much nonsense written about this topic that I've been meaning for <D... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 3,419 | {
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The Airbnbs <DATE_TIME> To celebrate Airbnb's IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb. What was special about the <PERSON> was how earnest they were. They did nothing half-way, and we could sense this even in the interview. Sometimes after we interviewed a ... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,074 | {
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How to Think for Yourself <DATE_TIME> There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 3,483 | {
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Early Work <DATE_TIME> One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to r... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 2,508 | {
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Modeling a Wealth Tax <DATE_TIME> Some politicians are proposing to introduce wealth taxes in addition to income and capital gains taxes. Let's try modeling the effects of various levels of wealth tax to see what they would mean in practice for a startup founder. Suppose you start a successful startup in your <DATE_TIM... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 437 | {
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Orthodox Privilege July 2020 "Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." <PERSON> There has been a lot of talk about privilege lately. Although the concept is overused, there is som... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 642 | {
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Coronavirus and Credibility <DATE_TIME> I recently saw a video of TV journalists and politicians confidently saying that the coronavirus would be no worse than the flu. What struck me about it was not just how mistaken they seemed, but how daring. How could they feel safe saying such things? The answer, I realized, is ... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 244 | {
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How to Write Usefully <DATE_TIME> What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful. To start with, that means it should be correct. But it's not enough merely to be correct... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 2,865 | {
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Being a Noob <DATE_TIME> When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out. Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true. I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always talking to some startup working in a new field I know nothing about, or reading a book about a topic I don't understand well enoug... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 391 | {
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Haters <DATE_TIME> (I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often surprised by the attention they get as their companies grow, but it applies equally to anyone who becomes famous.) If you become sufficiently famous, you'll acquire some fans who like you too much. These people are sometimes called "fanb... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,387 | {
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The Two Kinds of Moderate <DATE_TIME> There are two distinct ways to be politically moderate: on purpose and by accident. Intentional moderates are trimmers, deliberately choosing a position mid-way between the extremes of right and left. Accidental moderates end up in the middle, on average, because they make up their... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 665 | {
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Fashionable Problems <DATE_TIME> I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things. Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 196 | {
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Novelty and Heresy <DATE_TIME> If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy. To discover new things, you have to work on ideas that are good but non-obvious; if an idea is obviously good, other people are probably already working on it. One common way for a good i... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 265 | {
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The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius November 2019 Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic. To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some group of people, and... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 2,627 | {
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General and Surprising <DATE_TIME> The most valuable insights are both general and surprising. F = ma for example. But general and surprising is a hard combination to achieve. That territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable. Ordinarily, the best that people can do is one withou... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 441 | {
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Charisma / Power <DATE_TIME> People who are powerful but uncharismatic will tend to be disliked. Their power makes them a target for criticism that they don't have the charisma to disarm. That was <PERSON> problem. It also tends to be a problem for any CEO who is more of a builder than a schmoozer. And yet the builder-... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.62 | 122 | {
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The Risk of Discovery <DATE_TIME> Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn't a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don't seem risky eit... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 220 | {
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How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub <DATE_TIME> (This is a talk I gave at an event called Opt412 in <LOCATION>. Much of it will apply to other towns. But not all, because as I say in the talk, <LOCATION> has some important advantages over most would-be startup hubs.) What would it take to make <LOCATION> into a startu... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 2,577 | {
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Economic Inequality <DATE_TIME>, economic inequality in the <LOCATION> has increased dramatically. And in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer. Nearly everyone who writes about the topic says that economic inequality should be decreased. I'm interested in this question because I was one of the founders of a co... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 3,432 | {
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The Refragmentation January 2016 One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. <LOCATION> politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground. The creative class flocks to a handful of happy citie... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 7,125 | {
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<PERSON> <DATE_TIME> an article about Y Combinator said that early on it had been a "one-man show." It's sadly common to read that sort of thing. But the problem with that description is not just that it's unfair. It's also misleading. Much of what's most novel about YC is due to <PERSON>. If you don't understand her, ... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,949 | {
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A Way to Detect Bias <DATE_TIME> This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing anything about the applicant pool. Which is exciting because among other things it means third parties can use this technique to detect bias whether tho... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 574 | {
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Write Like You Talk <DATE_TIME> Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write in a different language than they'd use if they were talking to a friend. The sentence structure and even the words are dif... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 710 | {
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Default Alive or Default Dead? <DATE_TIME> When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or <DATE_TIME>, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over <DATE_TIME>, do they make it to profitability on t... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,505 | {
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Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice <DATE_TIME> I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand something important: why it's safe for startup founders to be nice people. I grew up with a cartoon idea of a very successful businessman (in the cartoon it was always a man): a rapacious, cigar-smoking, t... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 786 | {
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Change Your Name <DATE_TIME> If you have a <LOCATION> startup called X and you don't have <URL>, you should probably change your name. The reason is not just that people can't find you. For companies with mobile apps, especially, having the right domain name is not as critical as it used to be for getting users. The pr... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 767 | {
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What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? <DATE_TIME> One of the most valuable exercises you can try if you want to understand startups is to look at the most successful companies and explain why they were not as lame as they seemed when they first launched. Because they practically all seemed lame at first. Not just... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 381 | {
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The Ronco Principle <DATE_TIME> No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than <PERSON>. He knows what happened in every deal in the <LOCATION>, half the time because he arranged it. And yet he's a super nice guy. In fact, nice is not the word. Ronco is good. I know of zero instances in which he has... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 634 | {
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What Doesn't Seem Like Work? <DATE_TIME> My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors. He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want to do. When you talk to him about his childhood, there's a clear watershed at <DATE_TIME>, when he "go... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 486 | {
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Don't Talk to Corp Dev <DATE_TIME> Corporate Development, aka corp dev, is the group within companies that buys other companies. If you're talking to someone from corp dev, that's why, whether you realize it yet or not. It's usually a mistake to talk to corp dev unless (a) you want to sell your company right now and (b... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,294 | {
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Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In <DATE_TIME> <NRP> technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the <LOCATION>. Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners take these jobs, we should train more <NRP> to be programm... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 929 | {
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How to Be an Expert in a Changing World <DATE_TIME> If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing confidence in our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience a belief survived, the less likely it would be false. Most people implicitly believe something like this about their opinions. And they're... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,084 | {
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How You Know <DATE_TIME> I've read <PERSON>'s chronicle of <LOCATION> at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use ... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 641 | {
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Investor Herd Dynamics Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> 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 make... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,119 | {
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Do Things that Don't Scale Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've m... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 4,382 | {
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The Hardware Renaissance Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends before most other people. And one of the most conspicuous trends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups. Out of 84 companies, 7 were ma... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 403 | {
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Startup = Growth Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essent... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 5,387 | {
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The Top of My Todo List <DATE_TIME> A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying . Her list seems plausible. I could see myself - can see myself - making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes. If you had to compress them into a single piece of advice, it might be: don't be a cog.... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 241 | {
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How Y Combinator Started <DATE_TIME> Y Combinator's 7th birthday was <DATE_TIME>. As usual we were so busy we didn't notice till <DATE_TIME> after. I don't think we've ever managed to remember our birthday on our birthday. On <DATE_TIME>, <PERSON> and I were walking home from dinner in <LOCATION>. <PERSON> was working ... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,410 | {
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Defining Property <DATE_TIME> As a child I read a book of stories about a famous judge in <DATE_TIME> <LOCATION> called <LOCATION>. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop. A poor student who could afford only rice was eating his rice while enjoying the delicious cooking smells coming from t... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 994 | {
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Schlep Blindness Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness . Schlep was originally a <NRP> word but has passed into general use in the <LOCATION>. It... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 846 | {
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Snapshot: <PERSON>, <DATE_TIME> before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in <DATE_TIME> I took a snapshot of <PERSON>'s site . I thought it might be interesting to look at <DATE_TIME>. The first thing one notices is is how tiny the pages are. Screens were a lot smaller in <DATE_TIME>. If I remember correctly, our fro... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 863 | {
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Why Startup Hubs Work Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> If you look at a list of <LOCATION> 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 <D... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,787 | {
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The Patent Pledge <DATE_TIME> I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem without waiting for the government. I've never been 100% sure whether patents help or hinder technological progress. When I was a kid I thought they helped. I thought they protected inventors from having their idea... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 690 | {
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Subject: Airbnb March <DATE_TIME> <PERSON> published a remarkable post about missing Airbnb . VCs miss good startups all the time, but it's extraordinarily rare for one to talk about it publicly till long afterward. So that post is further evidence what a rare bird <PERSON> is. He's probably the nicest <LOCATION> I kno... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,269 | {
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Founder <PERSON> to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. <DATE_TIME> that was true. In the past, f... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 762 | {
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Tablets <DATE_TIME> I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android. The closest to a general term seems to be "mobile devices," but that (a) applies to any mobile phone, and (b) doesn't really capture what's distinctive about t... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 536 | {
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What We Look for in Founders Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> (I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.) 1. Determination This has turned out to be the most... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 795 | {
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The New Funding Landscape Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> After barely changing at all for <DATE_TIME>, 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. For... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 3,580 | {
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Where to <LOCATION> to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> <LOCATION> 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 fro... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,030 | {
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High Resolution Fundraising Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> 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 o... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 707 | {
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What Happened to Yahoo Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in <DATE_TIME>, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The pr... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 2,045 | {
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The Future of Startup Funding Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> 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 ne... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 3,892 | {
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The Acceleration of Addictiveness <DATE_TIME> What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating. We woul... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,279 | {
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Organic Startup Ideas Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator . <DATE_TIME> 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 deci... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,009 | {
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Persuade xor Discover <DATE_TIME> When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention is to seem extra friendly. You smile and say "pleased to meet you," whether you are or not. There's nothing dishonest about this. Everyone knows that these little social lies aren't meant to be taken literally, just as everyo... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,308 | {
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Post-Medium Publishing <DATE_TIME> Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it. In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, ... | paulgraham | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,781 | {
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Basecamp: Project management software, online collaboration We'd like to use cookies to help understand if our ads are working or not. No Yes, that's fine There are lots of ways to manage projects. And there's plenty of software promising to help. You've probably tried some. Yet, here you are. Unfortunately, most proje... | basecamp | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,836 | {
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Basecamp: Books we've written We'd like to use cookies to help understand if our ads are working or not. No Yes, that's fine On top of making <LOCATION>, we write books about what we've learned running our own business. They're filled with practical advice you won't find anywhere else. Shape Up Shape Up is for product ... | basecamp | for-profit | 0.95 | 572 | {
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Basecamp: The people's path to Basecamp We'd like to use cookies to help understand if our ads are working or not. No Yes, that's fine For many, tools like Asana, Trello, Notion, <DATE_TIME>, <PERSON>, and Slack were underwhelming stops along the road before finally arriving at <LOCATION>. <PERSON> Comics Before finall... | basecamp | for-profit | 0.95 | 2,148 | {
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Basecamp: Pricing We'd like to use cookies to help understand if our ads are working or not. No Yes, that's fine And don't stress - you can always switch packages later. sign ups <DATE_TIME> Free forever Run one project at a time. Sign up free $15/user per month We only bill you for employees. Invite guests/clients for... | basecamp | for-profit | 0.95 | 1,823 | {
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Basecamp: Download Basecamp for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android We'd like to use cookies to help understand if our ads are working or not. No Yes, that's fine <PERSON>, Windows, iOS, Android, and on the web - Basecamp is ready whenever and wherever you are. When it's time to roll up your sleeves and get to work, use <LO... | basecamp | for-profit | 0.885 | 176 | {
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Basecamp: Join us for a free live class We'd like to use cookies to help understand if our ads are working or not. No Yes, that's fine We'll answer questions about setting up <LOCATION>, rolling it out to your team, and anything else you'd like to ask. Intro to Basecamp We'll teach you the basics of using <LOCATION>, w... | basecamp | for-profit | 0.95 | 218 | {
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Basecamp: Reply to everyone, don't confuse stalking and selling, and when to jump into AI We'd like to use cookies to help understand if our ads are working or not. No Yes, that's fine Features we've added Reply to Everyone: Have you ever found yourself typing the same email over and over again? Maybe you got 14 emails... | basecamp | for-profit | 0.95 | 368 | {
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Basecamp: How we work We'd like to use cookies to help understand if our ads are working or not. No Yes, that's fine Hey there- There are a couple truths about working at 37signals that cause my friends to cock their heads in confusion. One of those truths is that we have an active comic book & video game chat room. An... | basecamp | for-profit | 0.95 | 611 | {
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