Paul Graham Quotes

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

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.

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.

There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.

Startups often have to do dubious things.

Some people just get what they want in the world.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.