Paul Graham

1964– · English-American programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

Topics: life, engineering leadership, programming, software design

• I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.

  — Paul Graham

• If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.

  — Paul Graham

• At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have zero.

  — Paul Graham

• Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.

  — Paul Graham

• At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.

  — Paul Graham

• Consulting is where product companies go to die.

  — Paul Graham

• The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.

  — Paul Graham

• There's no switch inside you [high school students] that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.

  — Paul Graham

• I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.

  — Paul Graham

• A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.

  — Paul Graham

• The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination [putting off important things to do unimportant things], because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.

  — Paul Graham

• There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.

  — Paul Graham

• The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want.

  — Paul Graham

• The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

  — Paul Graham

• The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.

  — Paul Graham