Paul Graham Quotes

• 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.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Think, Program

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

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Suppose

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

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Business

  Tags in Cheap

• 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.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Immediate

• For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Ambition

  Tags in Youngster

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

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Beauty, Business

  Tags in Idea

• 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.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Technology

  Tags in Programmer, Programming

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

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

• There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Startups often have to do dubious things.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Some people just get what they want in the world.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

• In the startup world, ‘not working’ is normal.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Paul Graham

  Topics in Uncategorized

Paul Graham (22)

Birth:	1964
Nationality:	-
Profession:	Computer Programmer, Essayist

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Today's Anniversary - 25th March

Births

• 1942 - Richard O'Brien
• 1906 - A. J. P. Taylor
• 1920 - Paul Scott
• 1931 - Thomas Wilson
• 1937 - Tom Monaghan

Deaths

• 1969 - Max Eastman
• 1980 - Milton H. Erickson
• 1976 - Josef Albers
• 1983 - Thomas S. Gates Jr.
• 1977 - Nunnally Johnson