Table of Contents
Each title opens the original essay on paulgraham.com. View all essays by date.
Startups
Founding, funding, and growing companies. 99 essays.
- Beating the Averages
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications
- The Other Road Ahead
- Revenge of the Nerds
- Great Hackers
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckage
- How to Start a Startup
- Undergraduation
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
- Hiring is Obsolete
- After the Ladder
- How to Fund a Startup
- The Venture Capital Squeeze
- Web 2.0
- Are Software Patents Evil?
- Why YC
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
- How to Be Silicon Valley
- Why Startups Condense in America
- The Power of the Marginal
- How to Present to Investors
- A Student's Guide to Startups
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup
- Microsoft is Dead
- The Hacker's Guide to Investors
- The Equity Equation
- How Not to Die
- The Future of Web Startups
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub
- A New Venture Animal
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
- Be Good
- Why There Aren't More Googles
- The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company
- A Fundraising Survival Guide
- Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
- The Other Half of "Artists Ship"
- Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?
- The High-Res Society
- Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.
- Startups in 13 Sentences
- How to Be an Angel Investor
- Relentlessly Resourceful
- A Local Revolution?
- Five Founders
- The Founder Visa
- Why Twitter is a Big Deal
- Ramen Profitable
- The Trouble with the Segway
- What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley
- The Anatomy of Determination
- What Startups Are Really Like
- Apple's Mistake
- Organic Startup Ideas
- How to Lose Time and Money
- The Top Idea in Your Mind
- The Future of Startup Funding
- What Happened to Yahoo
- High Resolution Fundraising
- The New Funding Landscape
- What We Look for in Founders
- Where to See Silicon Valley
- Founder Control
- Subject: Airbnb
- Why Startup Hubs Work
- Schlep Blindness
- Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
- Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
- How Y Combinator Started
- Black Swan Farming
- Startup = Growth
- The Hardware Renaissance
- How to Get Startup Ideas
- Startup Investing Trends
- Do Things that Don't Scale
- How to Convince Investors
- Investor Herd Dynamics
- How to Raise Money
- Before the Startup
- The Fatal Pinch
- Don't Talk to Corp Dev
- The Ronco Principle
- Change Your Name
- Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
- Default Alive or Default Dead?
- Jessica Livingston
- Economic Inequality
- How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
- Being a Noob
- Haters
- Modeling a Wealth Tax
- Billionaires Build
- The Airbnbs
- What I've Learned from Users
- How to Start Google
- The Reddits
- Founder Mode
- How Universities Should Prepare Founders
Wealth and Work
Making money, working hard, and choosing what to do. 22 essays.
- Being Popular
- How to Make Wealth
- Mind the Gap
- The Submarine
- Inequality and Risk
- How to Do What You Love
- An Alternative Theory of Unions
- Cities and Ambition
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
- How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
- The Refragmentation
- Donate Unrestricted
- How People Get Rich Now
- Crazy New Ideas
- How to Work Hard
- How to Do Great Work
- Superlinear Returns
- The Right Kind of Stubborn
- When To Do What You Love
- How to Convert Between Wealth and Income Tax
- How to Earn a Billion Dollars
- Making Startups Powerful
Programming and Technology
Languages, hackers, and the craft of building software. 22 essays.
- Java's Cover
- Five Questions about Language Design
- The Roots of Lisp
- What Made Lisp Different
- A Plan for Spam
- Better Bayesian Filtering
- Design and Research
- Why Nerds are Unpopular
- The Hundred-Year Language
- If Lisp is So Great
- Filters that Fight Back
- The Word "Hacker"
- The Python Paradox
- What I Did this Summer
- Holding a Program in One's Head
- Six Principles for Making New Things
- Trolls
- What I've Learned from Hacker News
- Fierce Nerds
- Programming Bottom-Up
- What Languages Fix
- Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented
Writing and Thinking
Essays, ideas, and how to think clearly. 81 essays.
- Taste for Makers
- Succinctness is Power
- Hackers and Painters
- The Age of the Essay
- What the Bubble Got Right
- A Version 1.0
- Bradley's Ghost
- Made in USA
- What You'll Wish You'd Known
- Return of the Mac
- Writing, Briefly
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source
- Ideas for Startups
- Good and Bad Procrastination
- 6,631,372
- See Randomness
- Copy What You Like
- The Island Test
- How Art Can Be Good
- Learning from Founders
- Is It Worth Being Wise?
- Two Kinds of Judgement
- Stuff
- How to Do Philosophy
- How to Disagree
- Some Heroes
- Disconnecting Distraction
- Lies We Tell Kids
- After Credentials
- Keep Your Identity Small
- Why TV Lost
- Persuade xor Discover
- Post-Medium Publishing
- The List of N Things
- The Acceleration of Addictiveness
- Tablets
- The Patent Pledge
- A Word to the Resourceful
- Defining Property
- Writing and Speaking
- The Top of My Todo List
- Mean People Fail
- How You Know
- Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
- What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
- What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
- A Way to Detect Bias
- Write Like You Talk
- This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California
- Charisma / Power
- The Risk of Discovery
- General and Surprising
- Novelty and Heresy
- The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
- Fashionable Problems
- Having Kids
- The Lesson to Unlearn
- The Two Kinds of Moderate
- How to Write Usefully
- Coronavirus and Credibility
- Orthodox Privilege
- The Four Quadrants of Conformism
- Early Work
- How to Think for Yourself
- Earnestness
- What I Worked On
- Write Simply
- The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty
- A Project of One's Own
- Beyond Smart
- Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?
- Putting Ideas into Words
- Heresy
- Alien Truth
- The Need to Read
- What You (Want to)* Want
- How to Get New Ideas
- The Best Essay
- Writes and Write-Nots
- Good Writing
- The Shape of the Essay Field
Life and Society
Culture, education, and how to live. 9 essays.