Essays

A collection of essays by Paul Graham on startups, programming, language design, and the art of writing.

228 essays

2001–2025 span

All Essays

The Shape of the Essay Field June 2025
Good Writing May 2025
What to Do March 2025
The Origins of Wokeness January 2025
Writes and Write-Nots October 2024
Founder Mode September 2024
When To Do What You Love September 2024
The Right Kind of Stubborn July 2024
The Best Essay March 2024
How to Start Google March 2024
The Reddits March 2024
Superlinear Returns October 2023
How to Do Great Work July 2023
How to Get New Ideas January 2023
The Need to Read November 2022
What You (Want to)* Want November 2022
Alien Truth October 2022
What I've Learned from Users September 2022
Heresy April 2022
Putting Ideas into Words February 2022
Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste? November 2021
Beyond Smart October 2021
Weird Languages August 2021
How to Work Hard June 2021
A Project of One's Own June 2021
Fierce Nerds May 2021
Crazy New Ideas May 2021
An NFT That Saves Lives May 2021
The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty April 2021
How People Get Rich Now April 2021
Donate Unrestricted March 2021
Write Simply March 2021
What I Worked On February 2021
Billionaires Build December 2020
The Airbnbs December 2020
Earnestness December 2020
How to Think for Yourself November 2020
Early Work October 2020
Modeling a Wealth Tax August 2020
The Four Quadrants of Conformism July 2020
Orthodox Privilege July 2020
Coronavirus and Credibility April 2020
How to Write Usefully February 2020
Haters January 2020
Being a Noob January 2020
Fashionable Problems December 2019
Having Kids December 2019
The Lesson to Unlearn December 2019
The Two Kinds of Moderate December 2019
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius November 2019
Novelty and Heresy November 2019
General and Surprising September 2017
The Risk of Discovery January 2017
Charisma / Power January 2017
This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California November 2016
How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub April 2016
Economic Inequality January 2016
The Refragmentation January 2016
Life is Short January 2016
Jessica Livingston November 2015
Default Alive or Default Dead? October 2015
A Way to Detect Bias October 2015
Write Like You Talk October 2015
Change Your Name August 2015
Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice August 2015
What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? February 2015
Don't Talk to Corp Dev January 2015
The Ronco Principle January 2015
What Doesn't Seem Like Work? January 2015
Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In December 2014
How to Be an Expert in a Changing World December 2014
How You Know December 2014
The Fatal Pinch December 2014
Mean People Fail November 2014
Startup Investing Trends June 2013
The Top of My Todo List April 2012
Defining Property March 2012
Writing and Speaking March 2012
How Y Combinator Started March 2012
Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998 January 2012
The Patent Pledge August 2011
Subject: Airbnb March 2011
Tablets December 2010
The Acceleration of Addictiveness July 2010
How to Lose Time and Money July 2010
Persuade xor Discover September 2009
The List of N Things September 2009
Post-Medium Publishing September 2009
What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley August 2009
The Trouble with the Segway July 2009
Five Founders April 2009
The Founder Visa April 2009
A Local Revolution? April 2009
Why Twitter is a Big Deal April 2009
How to Be an Angel Investor March 2009
Why TV Lost March 2009
What I've Learned from Hacker News February 2009
Keep Your Identity Small February 2009
Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. February 2009
After Credentials December 2008
Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession? December 2008
The High-Res Society December 2008
The Other Half of "Artists Ship" November 2008
The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company July 2008
Cities and Ambition May 2008
Lies We Tell Kids May 2008
Be Good April 2008
Some Heroes April 2008
How to Disagree March 2008
A New Venture Animal March 2008
Six Principles for Making New Things February 2008
Trolls February 2008
Why to Move to a Startup Hub October 2007
News from the Front September 2007
How to Do Philosophy September 2007
Holding a Program in One's Head August 2007
The Equity Equation July 2007
Stuff July 2007
An Alternative Theory of Unions May 2007
The Hacker's Guide to Investors April 2007
Two Kinds of Judgement April 2007
Microsoft is Dead April 2007
Is It Worth Being Wise? February 2007
Learning from Founders January 2007
How Art Can Be Good December 2006
Copy What You Like July 2006
The Island Test July 2006
Why Startups Condense in America May 2006
How to Be Silicon Valley May 2006
See Randomness April 2006
The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn April 2006
6,631,372 March 2006
Are Software Patents Evil? March 2006
Why YC March 2006
Good and Bad Procrastination December 2005
The Venture Capital Squeeze November 2005
What I Did this Summer October 2005
Inequality and Risk August 2005
After the Ladder August 2005
What Business Can Learn from Open Source August 2005
The Submarine April 2005
Return of the Mac March 2005
A Unified Theory of VC Suckage March 2005
Writing, Briefly March 2005
What You'll Wish You'd Known January 2005
It's Charisma, Stupid November 2004
Made in USA November 2004
A Version 1.0 October 2004
What the Bubble Got Right September 2004
The Age of the Essay September 2004
The Python Paradox August 2004
Mind the Gap May 2004
The Word "Hacker" April 2004
What You Can't Say January 2004
Filters that Fight Back August 2003
Hackers and Painters May 2003
If Lisp is So Great May 2003
The Hundred-Year Language April 2003
Why Nerds are Unpopular February 2003
Better Bayesian Filtering January 2003
Design and Research January 2003
Succinctness is Power May 2002
Taste for Makers February 2002
What Made Lisp Different December 2001
The Other Road Ahead September 2001
Five Questions about Language Design May 2001
Being Popular May 2001
The Roots of Lisp May 2001
Java's Cover April 2001
A Fundraising Survival Guide
A Plan for Spam
A Student's Guide to Startups
A Word to the Resourceful
Apple's Mistake
Beating the Averages
Before the Startup
Black Swan Farming
Bradley's Ghost
Disconnecting Distraction
Do Things that Don't Scale
Founder Control
Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
Great Hackers
High Resolution Fundraising
Hiring is Obsolete
How Not to Die
How to Convince Investors
How to Do What You Love
How to Fund a Startup
How to Get Startup Ideas
How to Make Wealth
How to Present to Investors
How to Raise Money
How to Start a Startup
Ideas for Startups
Investor Herd Dynamics
Lisp for Web-Based Applications
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
Organic Startup Ideas
Programming Bottom-Up
Ramen Profitable
Relentlessly Resourceful
Revenge of the Nerds
Schlep Blindness
Startup = Growth
Startups in 13 Sentences
The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
The Anatomy of Determination
The Future of Startup Funding
The Future of Web Startups
The Hardware Renaissance
The New Funding Landscape
The Power of the Marginal
The Top Idea in Your Mind
Undergraduation
Web 2.0
What Happened to Yahoo
What Languages Fix
What Startups Are Really Like
What We Look for in Founders
Where to See Silicon Valley
Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Why Startup Hubs Work
Why There Aren't More Googles
Why to Not Not Start a Startup
Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss