Paul Graham — Essays on WeSearch

How to Get Startup Ideas

November 2012The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems,…

Startup Investing Trends

Do Things that Don't Scale

July 2013One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of…

How to Convince Investors

August 2013When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back.…

Investor Herd Dynamics

August 2013The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of…

How to Raise Money

September 2013Most startups that raise money do it more than once. Others skip phase 1 and go straight to phase 2. And…

Before the Startup

October 2014(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. Maybe it's just…

Mean People Fail

The Fatal Pinch

How You Know

How to Be an Expert in a Changing World

Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In

Don't Talk to Corp Dev

What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

The Ronco Principle

What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?

Change Your Name

Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice

Default Alive or Default Dead?

Write Like You Talk

A Way to Detect Bias

Jessica Livingston

The Refragmentation

Economic Inequality

Life is Short

How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub

The Risk of Discovery

Charisma / Power

General and Surprising

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

Novelty and Heresy

The Lesson to Unlearn

Having Kids

Fashionable Problems

The Two Kinds of Moderate

Haters

Being a Noob

How to Write Usefully

Coronavirus and Credibility

Orthodox Privilege

The Four Quadrants of Conformism

Modeling a Wealth Tax

August 2020Some politicians are proposing to introduce wealth taxes in addition to income and capital gains taxes.…

Early Work

How to Think for Yourself

The Airbnbs

Billionaires Build

Earnestness

What I Worked On

Donate Unrestricted

Write Simply