id int64 0 217 | title stringlengths 5 52 | date stringlengths 8 14 ⌀ | text stringlengths 404 75.5k |
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203 | The Future of Startup Funding | August 2010 | Two years ago I [wrote](http://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html#next) about what I called "a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup funding:" the growing disconnect between VCs, whose current business model requires them to invest large amounts, and a large class of startups that need less than they used to. Increasin... |
204 | It's Charisma, Stupid | June 2006 | Occam's razor says we should prefer the simpler of two explanations. I begin by reminding readers of this principle because I'm about to propose a theory that will offend both liberals and conservatives. But Occam's razor means, in effect, that if you want to disagree with it, you have a hell of a coincidence to explai... |
205 | Great Hackers | July 2004 | _(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.)_
A few months ago I finished a new [book](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596006624), and in reviews I keep noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say nothing of "idiotic.''
I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was tryi... |
206 | A Version 1.0 | October 2004 | As E. B. White said, "good writing is rewriting." I didn't realize this when I was in school. In writing, as in math and science, they only show you the finished product. You don't see all the false starts. This gives students a misleading view of how things get made.
Part of the reason it happens is that writers don'... |
207 | How to Make Wealth | May 2004 | _(This essay was originally published in [Hackers & Painters](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624/104-0572701-7443937).)_
If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word "startup" d... |
208 | The Hundred-Year Language | April 2003 | _(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.)_
It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be... |
209 | Post-Medium Publishing | September 2009 | Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it.
In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or musi... |
210 | The New Funding Landscape | October 2010 | After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations.
The trends we've been seeing are probably not Y... |
211 | The Top Idea in Your Mind | July 2010 | I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.
Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is prob... |
212 | The Acceleration of Addictiveness | July 2010 | What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.
We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process t... |
213 | What We Look for in Founders | October 2010 | _(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.)_
**1\. Determination**
This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that t... |
214 | Persuade xor Discover | September 2009 | When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention is to seem extra friendly. You smile and say "pleased to meet you," whether you are or not. There's nothing dishonest about this. Everyone knows that these little social lies aren't meant to be taken literally, just as everyone knows that "Can you pass the sa... |
215 | Why Nerds are Unpopular | February 2003 | When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables conta... |
216 | The Word "Hacker" | April 2004 | To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer wants to or not.
To add to... |
217 | What the Bubble Got Right | September 2004 | _(This essay is derived from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.)_
I had a front row seat for the Internet Bubble, because I worked at Yahoo during 1998 and 1999. One day, when the stock was trading around $200, I sat down and calculated what I thought the price should be. The answer I got was $12. I went to the next cubicl... |
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