Relentlessly Resourceful
March 2009A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee could be called unlucky, but not hapless.
- ▪March 2009A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless.
- ▪But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job.
- ▪A team that outplays its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee could be called unlucky, but not hapless.
Paul Graham — Essays files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 219 of its stories.
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Record
| Original publisher | Paul Graham — Essays |
| Canonical URL | http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html |
| Publication time | Not provided by source |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T08:49:07.854Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T08:49:31.897Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2009A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee could be called unlucky, but not hapless. Hapless implies passivity. To be hapless is to be battered by circumstances — to let the world have its way with you, instead of having your way with the world. [1]Unfortunately there's no antonym of hapless, which makes it difficult to tell founders what to aim for.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Paul Graham — Essays.