paul graham essays cities

The Message of Cities

[ Tim Lee ] A good essay by Paul Graham on cities and ambition:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer. What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to. When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

Here in St. Louis, the message is "you should have met the right people in school." The cliche here is that the first thing St. Louisans ask when they meet each other is "what high school did you go to?" The answer tells them about the speaker's social class and often his religious background. Also, if you want to be successful in Missouri you don't don't go to the highly-ranked Washington University, but to the University of Missouri in Columbia, which is where the kids of other rich and powerful Missourians go to school. Needless to say, moving to St. Louis in your 20s isn't a brilliant career move:

No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

When I lived in DC and I told people I worked at a think tank, virtually everyone knew what that was and many were interested to know which one and what I did there. When I go to a party in St. Louis, the people I meet not only don't know what a think tank is, but a lot of them don't know what public policy is. I've taken to just telling people I'm a writer, which is something most people have heard of. Here's Graham's take on DC, which he admits he hasn't lived in long enough to be sure of:

In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you know. You want to be an insider. In practice this seems to work much as in LA. There's an A List and you want to be on it or close to those who are. The only difference is how the A List is selected. And even that is not that different.

Environments

Cities and Ambition: Paul Graham

A new essay by Graham, Cities and Ambition , plays right into my own proclivity to compare and contrast life in the major cities that I have known in my life. I grew up in the Bay Area—San Francisco, Berkeley and Silicon Valley—then spent the rest of my adult life in New York City and Boston/Cambridge. As I have continued to visit my former haunts on a regular basis, I came up with a few favorite delineators to compare the quality of life in each of these cities. (One that I used as an indicator of a city’s quality and that Graham also mentions is the eavesdropping factor.) But Graham’s taxonomy is so much more extensive and better than anything I’ve thought or read. He’s brilliant.

Because he is a Cantabridgian his assessment may seemed skewed to favor the home team. It probably is. But I’ll take a stand and say I agree with him wholeheartedly. All points of view are invited to comment. If you feel you need to make a case for Salt Lake City or Pittsburgh, please be my guest.

Note: This essay is bloody long, but I’m including the entire text because it is so interesting. If you aren’t in the mood to spend the time plowing through the whole thing, you can still find enjoyment in just the first few paragraphs. Hard core fans can ride it all the way to the end.

Cities and Ambition By Paul Graham

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.

What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.

When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

That’s not quite the same message New York sends. Power matters in New York too of course, but New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. The reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone.

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you’ve heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren’t genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him?

If even someone with the same natural ability as Leonardo couldn’t beat the force of environment, do you suppose you can?

I don’t. I’m fairly stubborn, but I wouldn’t try to fight this force. I’d rather use it. So I’ve thought a lot about where to live.

I’d always imagined Berkeley would be the ideal place—that it would basically be Cambridge with good weather. But when I finally tried living there a couple years ago, it turned out not to be. The message Berkeley sends is: you should live better. Life in Berkeley is very civilized. It’s probably the place in America where someone from Northern Europe would feel most at home. But it’s not humming with ambition.

In retrospect it shouldn’t have been surprising that a place so pleasant would attract people interested above all in quality of life. Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge. The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. You have to make sacrifices to live there. It’s expensive and somewhat grubby, and the weather’s often bad. So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.

As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What makes it true is that it’s more preposterous to claim about anywhere else. American universities currently seem to be the best, judging from the flow of ambitious students. And what US city has a stronger claim? New York? A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a much larger number of neanderthals in suits. The Bay Area has a lot of smart people too, but again, diluted; there are two great universities, but they’re far apart. Harvard and MIT are practically adjacent by West Coast standards, and they’re surrounded by about 20 other colleges and universities. [1]

Cambridge as a result feels like a town whose main industry is ideas, while New York’s is finance and Silicon Valley’s is startups.

When you talk about cities in the sense we are, what you’re really talking about is collections of people. For a long time cities were the only large collections of people, so you could use the two ideas interchangeably. But we can see how much things are changing from the examples I’ve mentioned. New York is a classic great city. But Cambridge is just part of a city, and Silicon Valley is not even that. (San Jose is not, as it sometimes claims, the capital of Silicon Valley. It’s just 178 square miles at one end of it.)

Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day the most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won’t matter where you live physically. But I wouldn’t bet on it. The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.

One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see into the houses. When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. In Cambridge you see shelves full of promising-looking books. Palo Alto was probably much like Cambridge in 1960, but you’d never guess now that there was a university nearby. Now it’s just one of the richer neighborhoods in Silicon Valley. [2]

A city speaks to you mostly by accident—in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It’s not something you have to seek out, but something you can’t turn off. One of the occupational hazards of living in Cambridge is overhearing the conversations of people who use interrogative intonation in declarative sentences. But on average I’ll take Cambridge conversations over New York or Silicon Valley ones.

A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping. At the time I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. Sure, it can be interesting to eavesdrop on people, but is good quality eavesdropping so important that it would affect where you chose to live? Now I understand what she meant. The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you’re among.

No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

There’s an imbalance between encouragement and discouragement like that between gaining and losing money. Most people overvalue negative amounts of money: they’ll work much harder to avoid losing a dollar than to gain one. Similarly, though there are plenty of people strong enough to resist doing something just because that’s what one is supposed to do where they happen to be, there are few strong enough to keep working on something no one around them cares about.

Because ambitions are to some extent incompatible and admiration is a zero-sum game, each city tends to focus on one type of ambition. The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just that there’s a concentration of smart people there, but that there’s nothing else people there care about more. Professors in New York and the Bay area are second class citizens—till they start hedge funds or startups respectively.

This suggests an answer to a question people in New York have wondered about since the Bubble: whether New York could grow into a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley. One reason that’s unlikely is that someone starting a startup in New York would feel like a second class citizen. [3] There’s already something else people in New York admire more.

In the long term, that could be a bad thing for New York. The power of an important new technology does eventually convert to money. So by caring more about money and less about power than Silicon Valley, New York is recognizing the same thing, but slower. [4] And in fact it has been losing to Silicon Valley at its own game: the ratio of New York to California residents in the Forbes 400 has decreased from 1.45 when the list was first published in 1982 to .83 in 2007.

Not all cities send a message. Only those that are centers for some type of ambition do. And it can be hard to tell exactly what message a city sends without living there. I understand the messages of New York, Cambridge, and Silicon Valley because I’ve lived for several years in each of them. DC and LA seem to send messages too, but I haven’t spent long enough in either to say for sure what they are.

The big thing in LA seems to be fame. There’s an A List of people who are most in demand right now, and what’s most admired is to be on it, or friends with those who are. Beneath that the message is much like New York’s, though perhaps with more emphasis on physical attractiveness.

In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you know. You want to be an insider. In practice this seems to work much as in LA. There’s an A List and you want to be on it or close to those who are. The only difference is how the A List is selected. And even that is not that different.

At the moment, San Francisco’s message seems to be the same as Berkeley’s: you should live better. But this will change if enough startups choose SF over the Valley. During the Bubble that was a predictor of failure—a self-indulgent choice, like buying expensive office furniture. Even now I’m suspicious when startups choose SF. But if enough good ones do, it stops being a self-indulgent choice, because the center of gravity of Silicon Valley will shift there.

I haven’t found anything like Cambridge for intellectual ambition. Oxford and Cambridge (England) feel like Ithaca or Hanover: the message is there, but not as strong.

Paris was once a great intellectual center. If you went there in 1300, it might have sent the message Cambridge does now. But I tried living there for a bit last year, and the ambitions of the inhabitants are not intellectual ones. The message Paris sends now is: do things with style. I liked that, actually. Paris is the only city I’ve lived in where people genuinely cared about art. In America only a few rich people buy original art, and even the more sophisticated ones rarely get past judging it by the brand name of the artist. But looking through windows at dusk in Paris you can see that people there actually care what paintings look like. Visually, Paris has the best eavesdropping I know. [5]

There’s one more message I’ve heard from cities: in London you can still (barely) hear the message that one should be more aristocratic. If you listen for it you can also hear it in Paris, New York, and Boston. But this message is everywhere very faint. It would have been strong 100 years ago, but now I probably wouldn’t have picked it up at all if I hadn’t deliberately tuned in to that wavelength to see if there was any signal left.

So far the complete list of messages I’ve picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of life.

My immediate reaction to this list is that it makes me slightly queasy. I’d always considered ambition a good thing, but I realize now that was because I’d always implicitly understood it to mean ambition in the areas I cared about. When you list everything ambitious people are ambitious about, it’s not so pretty.

On closer examination I see a couple things on the list that are surprising in the light of history. For example, physical attractiveness wouldn’t have been there 100 years ago (though it might have been 2400 years ago). It has always mattered for women, but in the late twentieth century it seems to have started to matter for men as well. I’m not sure why—probably some combination of the increasing power of women, the increasing influence of actors as models, and the fact that so many people work in offices now: you can’t show off by wearing clothes too fancy to wear in a factory, so you have to show off with your body instead.

Hipness is another thing you wouldn’t have seen on the list 100 years ago. Or wouldn’t you? What it means is to know what’s what. So maybe it has simply replaced the component of social class that consisted of being “au fait.” That could explain why hipness seems particularly admired in London: it’s version 2 of the traditional English delight in obscure codes that only insiders understand.

Economic power would have been on the list 100 years ago, but what we mean by it is changing. It used to mean the control of vast human and material resources. But increasingly it means the ability to direct the course of technology, and some of the people in a position to do that are not even rich—leaders of important open source projects, for example. The Captains of Industry of times past had laboratories full of clever people cooking up new technologies for them. The new breed are themselves those people.

As this force gets more attention, another is dropping off the list: social class. I think the two changes are related. Economic power, wealth, and social class are just names for the same thing at different stages in its life: economic power converts to wealth, and wealth to social class. So the focus of admiration is simply shifting upstream.

Does anyone who wants to do great work have to live in a great city? No; all great cities inspire some sort of ambition, but they aren’t the only places that do. For some kinds of work, all you need is a handful of talented colleagues.

What cities provide is an audience, and a funnel for peers. These aren’t so critical in something like math or physics, where no audience matters except your peers, and judging ability is sufficiently straightforward that hiring and admissions committees can do it reliably. In a field like math or physics all you need is a department with the right colleagues in it. It could be anywhere—in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for example.

It’s in fields like the arts or writing or technology that the larger environment matters. In these the best practitioners aren’t conveniently collected in a few top university departments and research labs—partly because talent is harder to judge, and partly because people pay for these things, so one doesn’t need to rely on teaching or research funding to support oneself. It’s in these more chaotic fields that it helps most to be in a great city: you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you care about the kind of work you do, and since you have to find peers for yourself, you need the much larger intake mechanism of a great city.

You don’t have to live in a great city your whole life to benefit from it. The critical years seem to be the early and middle ones of your career. Clearly you don’t have to grow up in a great city. Nor does it seem to matter if you go to college in one. To most college students a world of a few thousand people seems big enough. Plus in college you don’t yet have to face the hardest kind of work—discovering new problems to solve.

It’s when you move on to the next and much harder step that it helps most to be in a place where you can find peers and encouragement. You seem to be able to leave, if you want, once you’ve found both. The Impressionists show the typical pattern: they were born all over France (Pissarro was born in the Carribbean) and died all over France, but what defined them were the years they spent together in Paris.

Unless you’re sure what you want to do and where the leading center for it is, your best bet is probably to try living in several places when you’re young. You can never tell what message a city sends till you live there, or even whether it still sends one. Often your information will be wrong: I tried living in Florence when I was 25, thinking it would be an art center, but it turned out I was 450 years too late.

Even when a city is still a live center of ambition, you won’t know for sure whether its message will resonate with you till you hear it. When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It’s an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn’t like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air.

Some people know at 16 what sort of work they’re going to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be ambitious about. They know they want to do something great. They just haven’t decided yet whether they’re going to be a rock star or a brain surgeon. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it means if you have this most common type of ambition, you’ll probably have to figure out where to live by trial and error. You’ll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.

[1] This is one of the advantages of not having the universities in your country controlled by the government. When governments decide how to allocate resources, political deal-making causes things to be spread out geographically. No central goverment would put its two best universities in the same town, unless it was the capital (which would cause other problems). But scholars seem to like to cluster together as much as people in any other field, and when given the freedom to they derive the same advantages from it.

[2] There are still a few old professors in Palo Alto, but one by one they die and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev.

[3] How many times have you read about startup founders who continued to live inexpensively as their companies took off? Who continued to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in grad school, and so on? If you did that in New York, people would treat you like shit. If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they’re nice to you; who knows who you might be? Not in New York.

One sign of a city’s potential as a technology center is the number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. According to Zagat’s there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York, and 20 in Paris.

(Zagat’s lists the Ritz Carlton Dining Room in SF as requiring jackets but I couldn’t believe it, so I called to check and in fact they don’t. Apparently there’s only one restaurant left on the entire West Coast that still requires jackets: The French Laundry in Napa Valley.)

[4] Ideas are one step upstream from economic power, so it’s conceivable that intellectual centers like Cambridge will one day have an edge over Silicon Valley like the one the Valley has over New York.

This seems unlikely at the moment; if anything Boston is falling further and further behind. The only reason I even mention the possibility is that the path from ideas to startups has recently been getting smoother. It’s a lot easier now for a couple of hackers with no business experience to start a startup than it was 10 years ago. If you extrapolate another 20 years, maybe the balance of power will start to shift back. I wouldn’t bet on it, but I wouldn’t bet against it either.

[5] If Paris is where people care most about art, why is New York the center of gravity of the art business? Because in the twentieth century, art as brand split apart from art as stuff. New York is where the richest buyers are, but all they demand from art is brand, and since you can base brand on anything with a sufficiently identifiable style, you may as well use the local stuff.

Cities and Ambition

Have you ever been to a city that gives off a subtle “message” of either resonance or dissonance?

Dissonance is sometimes easier to sense or feel. The first time I visited Sofia, Bulgaria, was in the winter of 2003, and I liked nothing about the city.

It was cold, gray, and ugly — trying unsuccessfully to shed its past communist rule. The buildings still bore the stark, utilitarian architecture of the Soviet era, their concrete facades chipped and weather-worn. The streets were lined with dilapidated infrastructure, strewn with potholes you could lose a car in, and the public spaces lacked vibrancy and warmth.

I couldn’t wait to leave the city. It was overwhelmingly depressing. The “message” Sofia sent me was subtle but unmistakable: a sense of dissonance.

Not all cities radiate a message. Most don’t. Most are mute.

In May 2008, Paul Graham , the co-founder of influential startup accelerator firm Y Combinator, published an essay, Cities and Ambition . (It’s an excellent read.)

I don’t recall when I first read it, but it left an indelible mark.

I reread it recently (a few times), and it’s provided me with language I didn’t have before in describing the “messages” some cities subtly broadcast to their inhabitants.

Paul Graham’s framing is mapped to the idea of ‘ambition.’ And I like that because it ties directly to why a particular collection of people are attracted to a city.

Because the message the city sends to these people is the same.

“ Great cities attract ambitious people . You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.” “The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.” “When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.” “That’s not quite the same message New York sends. Power matters in New York too of course, but New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. The reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone.” Excerpts from Cities and Ambition by Paul Graham (2008)

When you talk about cities in this context, Paul Graham makes an interesting observation that what you’re really talking about is collections of people .

Cities implicitly “curate” a concentration of like-minded people.

As Paul Graham argues in the essay, Cambridge (Massachusetts) feels like a town whose primary industry is ideas , while New York’s is finance and Silicon Valley’s is startups . The message Paris sends now is: do things with style .

Cities provide an audience and a funnel for peers because it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you climbing the same mountain.

Where opportunities not available elsewhere can take hold, and serendipity can thrive.

But when a city doesn’t send a message, it doesn’t attract (ambitious) people of a particular calling. And it’s discouraging when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

Sofia had that effect on me twenty years ago.

A city speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It’s not something you have to seek out, but something you can’t turn off.

Bath in Somerset, UK, is one of those cities.

I can’t “turn off” the message I get from the city, a feeling that instantly resonated with me the first time I visited (and every time since).

I instantly fell in love.

I’ve since visited a handful of times, and each time the city sends me the same message: you should be an artist; a writer; a creative hell-raiser doing shit differently, a rebel, a misfit, one of the crazy ones .

The city seems to care for people like this, a subtle embrace, an insider’s nod invisible to everyone who doesn’t identify as a creative soul seeking a collection of their “weird” people.

… but, to me, the subtleties continue — the message from the old medieval city also says: you should love good food with local ingredients thoughtfully prepared and overvalue wonderful entertainment.

There’s a young vibe, too, thanks to the University of Bath (named University of the Year in 2023) contributing to the message.

I was there last month and had lunch with my dear friend and author, Joanna Penn .

I arrived a little early (I’m always early), so I popped into The Huntsman , a pub in stunning Georgian surroundings, and nursed an excellent locally brewed ale.

There was no desire to browse on my mobile. Not in this beautiful city, teaming with people. So I people-watched . Enjoying the atmosphere, the hum of conversations, random laughter, the clinking of glasses for celebrations unknown. The warm, rustic Georgian interior was filled with a mix of locals and tourists (two Spanish sat to my right), all contributing to the vibrant energy of the place. The aroma of hearty pub food wafted through the air, mingling with the hoppy scent of the ale in my hand.

I met Jo thirty minutes later at the OAK Restaurant , a two-minute walk just around the corner. She was already there, a white wine in front of her. She picked the spot, being the local, so I knew it would be wonderful.

But damn, was it “cozy” (aka small!) — no seats empty.

I’ve never tasted hummus, zhoug, and chickpeas like this before. Stunning! I’m so returning to this restaurant next time I visit Bath.

On the OAK website , it says:

As a grocer we specialise in organic, biodynamic and low intervention ingredients. At the heart of OAK is the idea that great food puts the soil first. As growers, grocers and cooks we want to sell produce and serve food that is simple and thoughtful, to find vegetables that not only look and taste great, but also come from land that has been farmed properly, without chemicals or over cultivation.

The city spoke to me over and over, like a faint signal in the air: you should be an artist, a writer, a creative hell-raiser. You should love good food with local ingredients thoughtfully prepared and overvalue wonderful entertainment.

Great cities attract ambitious people.

Walking around a great city, you can sense the ambition in the air. People are striving to achieve great things, and they are constantly surrounded by others who are doing the same.

People cut from the same weird cloth.

When surrounded by ambitious people working towards similar goals, staying motivated, focused, and energized can be easier, opening up opportunities not available elsewhere in such a concentration.

While Paul Graham’s essay focuses on (living in) physical cities, there is a noticeable analog to (some) online businesses.

As sovereign creators and Tiny World Builders , we architect non-linear Worlds for our audiences to inhabit, attracting ambitious people into our fold — the weird people we serve; the hell-raisers.

Like a great city, the “message” our Tiny Worlds says attracts a specific collection of ambitious people with common needs, wants, or aspirations.

For the sovereign creators I’m serving, the “city” I’m building here says:

you can do better;
the quality of your audience matters;
delight the weird;
the sacred act of earning trust and attention and fostering lasting relationships is worth the long-term effort;
‘open-world’ marketing is a container for this to happen, a canvas from which you build your Tiny World.

This Tiny World I’m building for you to inhabit is still small but will expand over time — the “message” it sends you will become more distinct and clear.

I’ll leave you with a question: What ‘message’ do you want your “city” to send to the ambitious citizens you aim to attract?

Because make no mistake, like it or not, your website, your place of business — it’s putting out a message . Subtly, implicitly, or “by accident,” it’s there, talking to your people.

The message is an emergent property — a felt voice — from all the “parts” of your business interacting in ways that are not always obvious or predictable.

But it’s there. Talking. Attracting.

(And repelling.)

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ECONLOG POST

May 28 2008

Paul Graham on Cities

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By Arnold Kling, May 28 2008

He writes ,

In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you know. You want to be an insider. In practice this seems to work much as in LA. There’s an A List and you want to be on it or close to those who are. The only difference is how the A List is selected. And even that is not that different.

Exactly. LA and DC are both name-dropper cities. In LA, the names to drop are those of leaders in the movie or TV business. In DC, the names to drop are those of key figures in Congress or the Administration.

Read the whole thing. Pointer from Megan’s guest-blogger (Tim Lee), who offers his own insight.

The cliche here is that the first thing St. Louisans ask when they meet each other is “what high school did you go to?” The answer tells them about the speaker’s social class and often his religious background.

Again, having grown up in St. Louis, I would say that this is spot on. The St. Louis elite is a remarkably closed, self-satisified set. The Merle Kling model of politics seems to apply particularly well in St. Louis. The game is for insiders there.

READER COMMENTS

READ COMMENT POLICY

guy in the veal calf office

May 28 2008 at 6:56pm.

I don’t understand the point of all this. What is the utility of knowing A listers? I can’t name a single thing it would improve in my life– even film premiers suck; I’d rather pay and do it simply.

May 28 2008 at 9:04pm

I had always thought that it was about “who you know” and figured that I would never make it because I am terrible at that sort of thing, and don’t know anybody (or didn’t). Plus I don’t have the usual credentials. But so far, I have gotten all my jobs, and now including my job at a prestigious think tank, without knowing anybody. I still don’t name drop because most names fall from my brain before they reach my tongue.

It turns out that other stuff matters, at least in DC.

May 29 2008 at 6:36am

“DC is LA for ugly people.”

I do not know the source, first saw it on Wonkette maybe 3 years ago? It is now ubiquitous in the blogosphere.

David Tufte

May 29 2008 at 11:50am.

New Orleans is similar to St. Louis, although Don Boudreaux would be a better source on this than me.

Comments are closed.

Are Charities Like Startups?

From Another Paul Graham essay: If you start from successful startups, you find they often behaved like nonprofits. And if you start from ideas for nonprofits, you find they'd often make good startups. In Under the Radar, where I argued in favor of bootstrapping a business, I wrote Fundraising is not for businesses....

He writes, In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is who you know. You want to be an insider. In practice this seems to work much as in LA. There's an A List and you want to be on it or close to those who are. The only difference is how the A List is selected. And even that is not that different. ...

Erik Trautman

“everything you can imagine is real.” -- pablo picasso, paul graham on "cities and ambition".

I don't intend to use this as a platform for just relinking to other blogs but, given the context of my recent posts, in this case it seems rather appropriate. In an archived essay, Paul Graham brings up some very insightful things about the characters of ambitious cities that I couldn't write any better myself. In particular, he talks about the subtler messages that cities send and why that is so important for choosing the right one. Check it out: http://paulgraham.com/cities.html

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July 28th, 2011

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Paul Graham on cities and ambition

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: [email protected], or follow me on Twitter .

Damn, this might be the best essay that Paul Graham has ever written , and I’ve liked every essay that he’s ever written:

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time. You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you’ve heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren’t genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him? If even someone with the same natural ability as Leonardo couldn’t beat the force of environment, do you suppose you can? I don’t. I’m fairly stubborn, but I wouldn’t try to fight this force. I’d rather use it. So I’ve thought a lot about where to live. I’d always imagined Berkeley would be the ideal place—that it would basically be Cambridge with good weather. But when I finally tried living there a couple years ago, it turned out not to be. The message Berkeley sends is: you should live better. Life in Berkeley is very civilized. It’s probably the place in America where someone from Northern Europe would feel most at home. But it’s not humming with ambition. In retrospect it shouldn’t have been surprising that a place so pleasant would attract people interested above all in quality of life. Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge. The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. You have to make sacrifices to live there. It’s expensive and somewhat grubby, and the weather’s often bad. So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather. …No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

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1 http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

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Paul Graham 101

There’s probably no one who knows more about startups than Paul Graham. Having helped thousands of startups through Y Combinator, the startup accelerator he co-founded, there’s a thing or two to learn from his essays. And Graham’s wisdom isn’t limited to startups either; his essays, read by millions, touch on education, intelligence, writing, society, the human mind, and much more.

I’ve read all of Paul Graham’s published essays (200+), ending up with enough notes to fill a book. This post tries to summarize the parts I’ve found most insightful and provide an accessible starting point for someone new to Graham.

Whenever possible, I’ve included links to his essays so you can easily go to the source when something interesting catches your eye. (Indeed, I recommend it - use this post as a gateway to the good stuff rather than a complete account in itself).

If my description of Graham’s idea sounds interesting, expect his essay to be 100x better. Always go back to the essays, where the ideas are fleshed out in full. This post is a very shallow overview.

Nevertheless, I hope this post inspires you to read Graham’s essays. They’re worth your time.

Boring disclaimer stuff:

I made a Google Docs version of this post, in case that's easier to navigate.
I’ve included all essays that were published before November 2021 ( Beyond Smart is the latest essay included). You can find a list of all essays on Graham’s site .
The info included is based on my interests at the time of reading the posts. Had I read an essay a year earlier or later, I’d likely have included something else. Plus, with over 200 essays, I’ve just downright overlooked and forgot important stuff. Again, I recommend you explore the essays yourself.
This post does NOT cover Paul Graham’s thoughts or essays on programming / coding. I’m simply not interested in or knowledgeable about that stuff, so I didn't think it fair to talk about it. He’s written a lot about coding, so if that’s your interest, explore his essays yourself.
Finally, if something seem off or missing, let me hear about it and I’ll fix it: [email protected] / Twitter

Okay, let’s jump in.

Paul Graham on Startups

Unsurprisingly, many of Graham’s essays are startup-related. Given his experience on the topic, there’s a lot to unwrap, including some classics like “Ramen Profitable”, “Do Things that Don’t Scale” and “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule”. Let’s start with an overview.

Startups in 13 sentences :

Pick good co-founders.
Launch fast.
Let your idea evolve.
Understand your users.
Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
Offer surprisingly good customer service.
You make what you measure.
Spend little.
Get ramen profitable.
Avoid distractions.
Don't get demoralized.
Don't give up.
Deals fall through.

For a detailed account, try How to Start a Startup .

This section presents some of Graham’s core ideas around startups, including the principles above.

Essays mentioned in this section:

Startups in 13 sentences

How to Start a Startup

Startup = Growth

How to Make Wealth

After Credentials

The Lesson to Unlearn

The Power of the Marginal

News from the Front

A Student's Guide to Startups

What Startups Are Really Like

Before the Startup

Hiring is Obsolete

Why to Not Not Start a Startup

The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn

Organic Startup Ideas

Six Principles for Making New Things

Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

Black Swan Farming

Crazy New Ideas

Why There Aren't More Googles

Ideas for Startups

Jessica Livingston

Startup FAQ

Earnestness

Relentlessly Resourceful

A Word to the Resourceful

The Anatomy of Determination

Mean People Fail

Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice

Design and Research

A Version 1.0

What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?

Beating the Averages

Do Things that Don't Scale

Ramen Profitable

Default Alive or Default Dead?

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Holding a Program in One's Head

How Not to Die

Disconnecting Distraction

Good and Bad Procrastination

Don’t talk to Corp Dev

The Top Idea in Your Mind

The Fatal Pinch

Startups are fundamentally different

Startups aren’t ordinary businesses. “ A startup is a company designed to grow fast ”, it is fundamentally different from your standard restaurant or hair salon. All decisions reflect this need to grow. Indeed, Graham says : “If you want to understand startups, understand growth”.

“Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.” (From How to Make Wealth )

Startups are also vastly different from your school experience. Your tests at school can be hacked, but success at startups is unhackable. At school, you learned that the way to get ahead is to perform well in a test, so you learned how to hack the tests . But in startups, you cannot really trick investors to give you money; the real hack is to be a good investment. You cannot really trick people to use your product; the real hack is to build something great. Valuable work is something you cannot hack.

So you don’t need to be a good student to be a good startup founder. In fact, if your opinions differ from those of your business teacher, that may even be a good thing (if your business teacher was excellent in business, they’d probably be a startup founder). In a startup, credentials don’t really matter - your users won’t care if you went to Stanford or got straight A’s. (Related: A Student's Guide to Startups ) .

Starting a startup is fundamentally different from a normal job , too. In a startup, experience is overrated . The one thing that matters is to be an expert on your users and the problem; everything else can be figured out along the way. “The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean.” (From Hiring is Obsolete ). By starting a startup, you can figure out your real market value.

So, startups are fundamentally different from other companies, school and “normal work”. But why don’t more people start them? Graham has listed common excuses (and rebuttals) in Why to Not Not Start a Startup .

Startups are wealth-creation machines

So, startups are fundamentally different. You cannot really understand them by looking at other things. But what are they then?

Startups are one of the most powerful legal ways to get rich. If you’re successful, you can, in a few years, get so rich you don’t know what to do with all the money. But perhaps even better than the money is all the time a successful founder saves:

“Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life.” (From The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn )

In How to Make Wealth , Graham shows why startups are optimized for wealth-creation. (And for clarity, wealth is different from money: wealth is what people want, while money is merely the medium of exchange to get it. So a startup doesn’t actually create money, it creates wealth; in other words, it creates something people want, and people give money for that. This distinction may seem small but it’s important: “making money” seems really complicated while “making something people want” is far easier.)

Why are startups optimized for wealth-creation?

Leverage: If a startup solves a complex problem, it only needs to solve it once, then scale it infinitely with technology. So a startup, once it cracks the code, can create a lot of wealth rapidly.

Measurement: The performance of every employee in a startup is easier to measure than the performance of every employee in a big organization. So if you perform well and create wealth, you’re in a better position to get paid according to your value in a startup.

More detail in How to Make Wealth .

Good startup ideas come from personal need and they don’t sound convincing

While there are many ways you could get startup ideas, Graham has observed that most successful startups were founded because of a personal need. Fix something for yourself, and don’t even think that you’re starting a company. Just keep on fixing the problem until you find that you’ve started a company. (From Organic Startup Ideas )

He’s also observed that good ideas tend to come from the margins - places you’d not expect. The idea is often very focused - like a book store online or a networking site for university students - so it isn’t obvious how it would change the world; we dismiss the idea until it becomes obvious.

So, good ideas don’t initially sound like billion-dollar ideas - what even is a billion-dollar idea? Certainly not something we could recognize in advance. Indeed, the initial idea is usually so crude and basic that you’ll ignore it if you’re looking for a billion-dollar idea. The really big ideas may even repel you - they are too ambitious.

A good idea doesn’t sound convincing because, for no one to have already taken it, it must be a bit crazy or unconventional. “The most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good. Which is not that far from a description of insanity, till you reach the point where you see results.” (From Black Swan Farming )

Indeed, when someone presents a crazy new idea to you, and if they are “both a domain expert and a reasonable person”, chances are that it’s a good idea (even if it sounds like a bad one). “If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don't. And if they have deep domain expertise, that's probably the source of it.”

Graham also emphasizes that it is not the idea that matters, but the people who have them.

Oh, and "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." ( Graham quoting Howard Aiken )

Nevertheless, if you’re in need of inspiration, Graham has some good starting points for coming up with startup ideas.

Founders make the startup

“ The earlier you pick startups, the more you’re picking the founders. ” Throughout his essays, Graham emphasizes the importance of the founders. More than anything - target audience, trends, TAM… - a startup’s success is influenced by the founders. (Obviously, the other employees matter, too. But founders are special, they are the heart and soul of the startup.)

“Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard.” (from Startups in 13 Sentences ).

Indeed, Graham notes that most successful startups tend to have multiple founders .

Earnestness and resourcefulness make a good founder

If the founders are the most important factor for a startup’s success, it is critical to understand what makes a good founder. Indeed, this is the topic of numerous essays.

According to Graham, a good founder is:

“The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as ‘earnest.’”

An earnest person does something for the right reasons and tries as hard as they can. The right reason usually isn’t to make a lot of money, but to solve a problem or satisfy an intellectual curiosity. This is why it’s important to figure out your intrinsic motivation or embrace your nerdiness (both of which we’ll discuss later).

“A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.”

Relentless = make things go your way

Resourceful = adapt and try new things to make things go your way

Relentlessly resourceful people know what they want, and they will aggressively try things out and “hustle” until they get what they want. Consider the Airbnb founders and selling cereal .

Graham noticed a pattern around resourcefulness: when he talks to resourceful founders, he doesn’t need to say much. He can point them in the right direction, and they’ll take it from there. The un-resourceful founders felt harder to talk to.

It is not the most intelligent who succeed, but the most determined . Smart people fail all the time while dumb people succeed just because they decide they must.

"Make something people want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there.

Oh, also: good founders aren’t mean. Mean People Fail and can’t get good people to work with them while startup founders who are nice tend to attract people to them .

Make something people want

If there’s one piece of startup advice to take from Graham, it’s this: “Make something people want”. (As you may know, this is also Y Combinator’s motto)

Yes, it is obvious. But it’s also pretty much the only thing that matters in a startup: if you just make something people want, you’ll attract users, employees, investors, money. “ You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives .”

Indeed, many early-stage startups are “ indistinguishable from a nonprofit ”, because they focus so much on helping the users and less so on making money. Funnily, this approach makes them money in the long term.

“In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product. For most, the cause of death is listed as ‘ran out of funding,’ but that's only the immediate cause. Why couldn't they get more funding? Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be done, or both.” (From How to Start a Startup )

So how do you make something people want? Get close to users, launch fast, then iterate.

Get close to users

“The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.” (From Startups in 13 Sentences )

“You have to design for the user, but you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. It's much like being a doctor. You can't just treat a patient's symptoms. When a patient tells you his symptoms, you have to figure out what's actually wrong with him, and treat that.” (From Design and Research )

Since you may not precisely know who your users are and what exactly are their needs before you launch, it’s useful to yourself be a user of your product. If you use and like the product, other people like you may, too. This is why successful startups tend to arise from personal need.

Launch fast, then iterate

“The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.”

The importance of iterations is highlighted in “ A Version 1.0 ”, “ What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? ” and “ Early Work ”, among others. (If you understand the importance of iterations, then you understand that you must release a version 1 as soon as possible, so you can start iterating sooner.)

Some ideas from these essays:

Don’t be discouraged by people’s ridicules of your early work. Just keep on iterating. (There will always be Trolls and Haters . Don’t mind them.)
Don’t compare your early work with someone’s finished work. (If you wanted to compare your work to something, it’d optimally be a successful person’s early work. But people tend to hide their first drafts, precisely because they don’t want to be ridiculed.)
When in doubt, ask: Could this really lame version 1 turn into an impressive masterpiece, given enough iterations?

Iterating and getting through the lame early work never gets easy. But Graham has listed some useful tips to trick your brain in “ Early Work ”.

Execution is a pathless land, but there is advice to be given

Mostly, a startup shouldn’t try to replicate what other startups do:

“If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.”

Startup execution is a pathless land; there’s no formula to follow, even though many blog posts and thought leaders want you to believe otherwise. This is why it’s so important for the founders to be earnest and relentlessly resourceful: they need to figure it out themselves.

Even though there isn’t a connect-the-dots type of way to succeed in the startup world, Graham has observed hundreds (if not thousands) of startups from a very close distance, so he has identified general principles that help:

Do Things that Don’t Scale

“Think of startups not only as something you build and you scale, but something you build and force to scale.”

“Startups take off because the founders make them take off. If you don’t take off, it’s not necessarily because the market doesn’t exist but because you haven’t exerted enough effort.”

At some point, your startup may grow on autopilot. But before you’re there, you need to do seemingly insignificant things, like cold emailing potential clients, speaking to people at conferences or offering “ surprisingly good customer service ”.

The “Do Things that Don’t Scale” advice helps us remember that building something great is only one part of the equation; we must also do laborious, unscalable work to get initial growth, no matter how great the product is.

Get Ramen Profitable

Ramen profitability = a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses.

“Ramen profitability means the startup does not need to raise money to survive. The only major expenses are the founders’ living expenses, which are now covered (if they eat ramen).”

Significance: Ramen profitability means that the startup turns from default dead into default alive . The game changes from “don’t run out of money” into “don’t run out of energy”. While running a startup is never not stressful, reaching ramen profitability does take a weight off your shoulders.

To increase your startup’s chances of succeeding, increase your chances of survival; to increase your chances of survival, reach ramen profitability.

Maintain a Maker’s Schedule

To get into the making/building mindset, you need big chunks of time with no interruptions. You can’t build a great product in 1-hour units in-between meetings; “that’s barely enough time to get started”. If you think of the stereotypical coder, they prefer to work throughout the night, probably because no one can distract them at 3am.

“When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”

If you want to create great stuff, you need to be mindful that a manager and a maker operate on very different schedules. If you’re the manager, try to give big blocks of time for the maker; if you’re the maker, try to schedule all meetings on two days of the week so the rest is free for creating.

Holding a Program in One's Head expands on some of these ideas.

What not to do

Graham has also figured out something about the inverse: what not to do. Or, as he puts it, “ How Not to Die ”.

Keep morale up (don’t run out of energy)
Don’t run out of money (for example, hire too fast)
Don’t do other things. The startup needs your full attention. ( Procrastination is mostly distraction . Avoid distractions and you’ll avoid procrastination. Note, though, that you can procrastinate well .)
Make failing unbelievably humiliating (to force you to give your everything)
Simply don’t give up, especially when things get tough

To summarize this part on execution, here are Paul Graham’s Six Principles for Making New Things :

Simple solutions
To overlooked problems
That actually need to be solved
Deliver these solutions as informally as possible
Starting with a very crude version 1
Then iterating rapidly

The more you focus on money, the less you focus on the product

Graham doesn’t often talk about money, and when he does, I get this weird feeling. It’s like “sure, we’re talking about money... but I’d rather we talk about the product instead.” Let me explain:

In Don’t talk to Corp Dev , Graham says all a startup needs to know about M&A is that you should never talk to corp dev unless you intend to sell right now. So it’s better to focus on the product until you absolutely must think about M&A.

In The Top Idea in Your Mind : “once you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mind”, instead of users and the product. So your product suffers.

When you get money, don’t spend it . “ The most common form of failure is running out of money ”, and you can avoid that by not spending money, not hiring too fast.

One instance when you should think about money is if your startup is default dead . “Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left?” If you know you’re default dead, your focus quickly shifts to turning the ship around and reaching profitability; avoiding The Fatal Pinch .

In the long term, it’s obvious that the company that focuses more on the users and product beats the company that obsesses over investors and raising money.

Paul Graham on What to work on

What to work on is one of the most important questions in your life, along with where you live and who you’re with. While Graham’s treatment of this question definitely leans on the side of startups, you can also view his ideas from the perspective of side hustles, hobbies, projects (in or outside of a career) and so on.

What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

Why Nerds are Unpopular

Fashionable Problems

How to Do What You Love

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

A Project of One's Own

Great Hackers

Follow intrinsic motivation

If it’s something you’re intrinsically motivated about, that’s something where you have infinite curiosity, and that’s something you’ll eventually do well in. (Later, we’ll discuss how curiosity leads to genius.)

“ If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for. ” Put another way: the stranger your tastes seem to other people, the more you should embrace those tastes.

Because of the internet, you can make money by following your curiosity. This is a revolutionary shift : in the past, money was gained from a boring job, and you satisfied your curiosity during the weekends. But now, you can make real money just by following your curiosity, whether it’s from a startup or a YouTube or Gumroad account.

The two greatest powers in the world - money and curiosity - are getting more aligned each day. There has never been a greater time to follow your intrinsic motivation. Now, the important question is what to work on, not how to make money, because if you figure out an answer to the former, the latter question will answer itself.

Turns out, nerds are far closer to figuring out the answer than non-nerds. (Nerds - or earnest people - do something for the sake of it, not to become popular or rich). Nerds in high school tend to be unpopular , not because they couldn’t figure out how popularity works and game the system, but perhaps because they don’t really want to be popular. That makes high school a tough time for them, but real life becomes much more fulfilling: while others are stuck in the popularity/status rat race and compete to work on Fashionable Problems , the nerds can follow their own curiosities, thus work on stuff no one else is working on, thus discover new things, thus succeed. Plus, they have a much nicer time doing so.

A question to figure out your intrinsic motivation and what to work on: “What are you a big nerd on?”

Let’s end this part with a sharp and practical observation from “ How to Do What You Love ”:

“To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool.”

You should be working on your own projects

The logical conclusion of following your intrinsic motivation is that you should be working on your own projects (or other people’s projects where you have significant ownership).

You may have noticed that projects you start on your own feel fundamentally different from tasks handed to you by a manager or teacher. And there’s a reason for that: “ You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss ”.

In that essay, Graham makes the argument that even though working in a large organization is the default now, it’s not how we evolved to work. A large organization is similar to the modern diet - consisting of pizza, candies and other processed foods - while a small group (like a startup) is the hunter-gatherer diet. One is easy and safe and appealing in the short term (but terrible over time) while the other is hard and unappealing, but more natural and better in the long term.

While working in smaller groups makes you happier and gives you more freedom, it’s also the way to do great work, as Graham argues in “ A Project of One’s Own ”. If a project feels like it’s your own, you have motivation and skin in the game that you don’t otherwise have. You’re much more willing to obsess over the details and make something great.

Work on things that you want to take over your life

“It's a mistake to insist dogmatically on ‘work/life balance.’ Indeed, the mere expression ‘work/life’ embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct. [...] I wouldn't want to work on anything I didn't want to take over my life.” (From “ A Project of One’s Own ”)

For startup founders, the startup is their life - there is time for little else, even sleep. Why would they willingly work 80+ hours a week and eat nothing but ramen , with no guaranteed financial reward, when they could work 40 hours a week and eat lobster at a big company? Because the startup is a project of their own, and they have - hopefully consciously - decided it’s something they want to take over their lives. “People will do any amount of drudgery for companies of which they're the founders.”

How do you know if something has taken over your life? Here’s a simple test: Do you think about it in the shower?

In “ The Top Idea in Your Mind ”, Graham argues that if something is really important to you, then your mind will think about it subconsciously and ideas will appear in your head whilst walking or showering. Indeed, if this does not happen, you’ll have trouble doing great work - that’s your sign to reconsider what you work on.

Paul Graham on Thinking & Decision-making

Startup founders are an interesting group of people: they seek to change something about the status quo, which means they see something non-obvious that could be improved and they believe in that improvement so much that they’re willing to work 80+ hours a week and eat ramen until their vision becomes a reality.

What drives them? It can’t be just money - there are so many founders who’ve already gotten rich, and they still work in their companies and start new startups. And why aren’t there more founders? What qualities are there in a founder that you don’t find in non-founders?

By trying to understand this group of people, Graham has discovered a lot about thinking, decision-making, and the human mind in general.

The Four Quadrants of Conformism

The Two Kinds of Moderate

Orthodox Privilege

Novelty and Heresy

How to Disagree

How to Think for Yourself

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

Is It Worth Being Wise?

Beyond Smart

How to Work Hard

Mind the Gap

Being a Noob

How to Be an Expert in a Changing World

How Art Can Be Good

Taste for Makers

The Island Test

Independent-mindedness vs conventional-mindedness

Independent-minded people prefer to think through things for themselves, and because of this, they may seem weird to conventional-minded people (who follow the average and agreeable). Hence, it is almost a tautology to say that new ideas and new startups are the work of independent-minded people.

In The Four Quadrants of Conformism , Graham goes a bit deeper and differentiates between aggressive and passive forms of independent-mindedness and conventional-mindedness. Notably, aggressively independent-minded people tend to question existing norms and rules, working against them, while aggressively conventional-minded people work to maintain the norms and rules. There’s a clash between the groups, so it’s important for independent-minded people to “be protected”, be given space to innovate, break norms and come up with new ideas and things. (These “protected areas” are important for innovation. You could think of Silicon Valley as one.)

If you know someone is conventional-minded, you know a lot about them. Their beliefs and actions match the average, and you know what the average is. Whereas, if someone is independent-minded, you don’t really know them; they think things through for themselves, and thus they may arrive at conclusions you can’t imagine. In fact, on one issue, independent-minded people can be in the political left, and on another issue, in the political right; they are politically moderate by accident . A conventional-minded person is more likely either in the left or right for every issue.

Conventional-minded people have what Graham calls Orthodox Privilege : it seems to them that everyone is safe to express their opinions because everything they think about is conventional and uncontroversial. “They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble.”

So if you do express your controversial, new ideas to them, they may regard them as untrue heresy. Novelty and Heresy go hand-in-hand. “It doesn't seem to conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It just seems to them that they're right.” To them, anything that is unconventional is likely to be false; to the independent-minded, anything too conventional seems suspicious. So if you express your independent-minded thoughts publicly, you may want to learn How to Disagree .

In How to Think for Yourself , Graham shows there are some types of work that you can only do well in if you think differently from others: Scientists aim to discover something new, so being conventional-minded won’t get you very far; an investor who thinks exactly like everyone else will not get rich; a startup founder who shares the same ideas as everyone else won’t build great new stuff. You need to be right and most other people need to be wrong.

Of course, not every type of work is like this. You can be a good administrative worker without thinking differently from others; it’s not essential that everyone else is wrong. Generally, independent-minded people want to work in areas where newness is rewarded.

In How to Think for Yourself , Graham shares some exercises for training your independent-mindedness muscles.

Genius comes from infinite curiosity, intelligence, hard work and courage

We tend to think some people are just blessed with genius, that it’s an innate thing. But Graham has taken this black box apart and argues genius is something you can influence.

“ Those who do really great work have an unexplainable obsession about something ”. Infinite curiosity leads to surprising discoveries, simply because you think about and play with the topic more than any rational person would expect. And all that thinking and tinkering feels like play to you (but looks like work to others) because an obsessive interest “is a proxy for ability and a substitute for determination”.

Intelligence

There’s a difference between wisdom and intelligence . If wisdom means a high average outcome across all outcomes, intelligence is a spectacularly high outcome in a few situations. If we think of “genius”, it tends to fit the latter description: you can be a terrible fool about everything else, but if you discover relativity, you’re a genius.

High curiosity in something + high intelligence in that domain are a great beginning. But not necessarily enough to discover important new ideas. As Graham elaborates in Beyond Smart , there are smart people, and then there are those who have important new ideas; “There are a lot of genuinely smart people who don’t achieve very much.”

Intelligence and curiosity are perhaps necessary to become a genius, but not sufficient; you also need hard work to uncover new ideas and courage to pursue them, as developing something new challenges your ego (and irritates the conventional-minded people).

Hard work and courage

Even when you’re undeniably brilliant, you cannot avoid hard work. (Indeed, just knowing How to Work Hard can get you closer to sheer brilliance.) Hard work in itself isn’t the goal, though. Output matters (output being, in this context, important new ideas): “ If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush .”

When you start to do or learn anything new, you’ll Be a Noob at it first. But “the more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.” In How to Be an Expert in a Changing World , Graham notes that if your opinion was right once, it may not be right anymore because the world has changed. So it takes intellectual humility and courage to update your opinions to the new world, instead of clinging to the opinions you formed in the old world.

Putting together Graham’s thoughts, it seems like genius is not an innate quality that you can’t influence, but a combination of multiple qualities like curiosity, intelligence, hard work and courage.

Good taste is necessary for good work

Good taste is a quality related to genius. Some people seem to have an “eye” for design or an “ear” for music, but Graham shows, again, that taste is something you can develop.

”Taste is subjective” isn’t true, and you see it as soon as you start designing or writing or building things. There’s good art and there’s bad art , good writing and bad writing, nice design and less nice design. Saying “taste is subjective” is lazy and won’t help you improve your work.

So if you want to create better stuff, you need to realize that you may have poor taste and you need to develop good taste, normally by getting better at your craft or studying those who have good taste. “Good work happens when you see something is ugly, understand why, and have the ability to fix it into something beautiful.” (From Taste for Makers )

So what is good art or design? Graham gives a list (I redacted a few points):

Solves the right problem
Often slightly funny
Uses symmetry
Resembles nature
Often strange
Often daring

Good work isn’t necessarily the most popular work; “There are sources of error so powerful that if you take a vote, all you're measuring is the error.” But if you do good work, eventually, people will appreciate it.

Is your argument testable?

If you read Graham closely, you notice that often when he makes an argument, he immediately considers what kind of test is needed to validate the argument. He’s thinking like a scientist: only accepting an argument if it’s testable.

Watch him do it in How to Do What You Love :

And in The Island Test , he presents a test to figure out what you’re addicted to:

“Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to leave while you're there. Also, you've never been to this house before, so you can't assume it will have more than any house might.

What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing? That's what you're addicted to.”

In some cases, the way to make a point (and make it practical) is to devise a test. In How to Start a Startup , Graham explores what makes a good startup employee. He could just say “they are determined and will do whatever it takes”, but that’s not a testable argument, and not very practical for someone who’s hiring.

Instead, Graham devised a test: “Could you describe the person as an animal?” If you could say “Jaakko is an animal” and don’t laugh but rather take the description seriously, that’s the person you want in your startup. An animal of a salesperson simply won’t take no for an answer; an animal of a programmer will stay up all night to finish the code; an animal of a PR person will pitch every newspaper in the city until your startup gets featured.

Fun evening activity: Go through an essay you’ve written and see if each of the arguments you make is testable.

Paul Graham on Writing

Paul Graham is known for incredibly clear and simple writing. Each of his essays is easy to understand, no matter how complicated the topic.

You can learn a lot about writing just by reading Graham, and doubly so if it’s an essay on the topic of writing. Fortunately for us, there are many such essays.

For starters, Graham has summarized his writing philosophy in Writing, Briefly . It’s an entire writing course, condensed into one (long) sentence. I recommend you read it now before continuing below.

Writing, Briefly

Writing and Speaking

The List of N Things

Persuade xor Discover

General and Surprising

The Age of the Essay

How to Write Usefully

Write Simply

Write Like You Talk

Economic Inequality

Writing is how you get ideas, develop ideas and improve your thinking

If you read Writing, Briefly , as you should, you noticed this:

“I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.”

From an idea perspective, being a good writer is better than being a good speaker. You need good ideas to have good essays, but you can do a good speech without saying much at all. Though speeches can be better for motivation and personal touch, writing is better for ideas.

Don’t write to persuade, write to discover something new and useful

There are roughly two types of essays: those where you know exactly where it’s going before you start, and those where you have no clue where it’s going.

We’re taught to write the first type of essay in school: we write the thesis statement in the introduction and ensure that the rest of the essay supports that thesis. We’re writing to persuade the reader, so that they’ll accept our thesis. A listicle is equivalent to that type of essay, and writing one doesn’t help you discover new ideas or knowledge. “ I worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously from ideas I knew would be hard to sell .”

Paul Graham is a supporter (and practitioner) of the second type, writing to discover. In his mind, an essay is supposed to be two things: new and useful.

An essay should be new

If an essay doesn’t share something new or surprising, what good is it? When we write to discover, we want to surprise ourselves and the reader. Most surprising = furthest from what people currently believe .

But just anything new doesn’t cut it. There’s constantly new info and news, and that doesn’t make a difference in our lives. What we should aim for is something General and Surprising . “Ordinarily, the best that people can do is one without the other: either surprising without being general (e.g. gossip), or general without being surprising (e.g. platitudes).” If you can do some combination of general and surprising (at least to some people), you’ve got a winning essay.

“ Essays should aim for maximum surprise. ”

An essay should be useful

What does it mean for an essay to be useful? Graham offers some ideas in How to Write Usefully :

When something is useful, it’s correct. If it’s merely persuasive, it could be false. “Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.” (From The Age of the Essay )
“Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false.”
“Useful writing tells something important that people didn’t already know” (again, going back to the “surprise” idea)

Good writing is rewriting (in particular, rewriting to make the text simpler)

Just like in anything involving skill, the way to get better is through iterations. Good writing is rewriting . Because we can’t see someone’s drafts and rewrites, we compare their end product to our Early Work , then get discouraged looking at the gap. Instead, we must appreciate that something bad now could become great, if we iterate enough.

“My strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an essay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting it very carefully.” (From How to Write Usefully )

And when you rewrite, your main goal is to make your writing simple . Most of the time, the simplest words and simplest sentences are better than decorative, complicated words. Your purpose is to convey an idea, not to use fancy words and make the reader “do extra work just so you can seem cool.”

In Write Like You Talk , Graham shares a trick for writing simply: explain your ideas to a friend by talking; then, use that transcript as a draft for your essay. The spoken and written version of your idea should be as close to each other as possible. “If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers.”

When possible, find a metaphor for your idea

This is not direct advice from Graham (though he does recommend you write simply, and what’s simpler than a great metaphor?)

Instead, this is a theme you notice if you read a lot of Graham. Metaphors are a weapon he wields often.

Some of my favorite metaphors from Paul Graham:

“There's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means ‘leap into the mouth.’ My goal when writing might be called saltintesta: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.” (From Write Simply )

“People don’t realize that scrapping things together is how big things get started. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding ‘there's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything.’” (From Do Things that Don’t Scale )

“The list of n things [listicle] is in that respect the cheeseburger of essay forms. If you're eating at a restaurant you suspect is bad, your best bet is to order the cheeseburger. Even a bad cook can make a decent cheeseburger. And there are pretty strict conventions about what a cheeseburger should look like. You can assume the cook isn't going to try something weird and artistic. The list of n things similarly limits the damage that can be done by a bad writer.” (From The List of N Things )

“Sometimes it's because the writer only has very high-level data and so draws conclusions from that, like the proverbial drunk who looks for his keys under the lamppost, instead of where he dropped them, because the light is better there.” (From Economic Inequality )

“If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.” (From Mind the Gap )

“I'm not sure why. It may just be my own stupidity. A can-opener must seem miraculous to a dog.” (From Taste for Makers )

“A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing: to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.” (From How to Make Wealth )

“The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, which require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, and to treat them as articles of faith. To an independent-minded person that would seem revolting, just as it would seem to someone fastidious about food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with a large variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and provenance.” (From How to Think for Yourself )

Paul Graham on Society

Startups turn into big companies, startup founders turn into billionaires , products used by hundreds turn into products used by millions... If you’re working to help startups, you’re working to change society in a big way.

The Refragmentation

Inequality and Risk

What You Can't Say

“Reducing wealth inequality” isn’t as great as it sounds

As we established earlier, a startup is a wealth-creation machine. As such, it shouldn’t surprise us to see Graham discussing wealth inequality and why it isn’t the demonic thing many believe.

Wealth inequality is a divisive topic, and one I’m no expert in, so I’ll try to provide a general overview without twisting Graham’s ideas into something they aren’t. You might want to read the essays in full if you’re interested in the topic.

By default, we think wealth inequality is inherently bad.

In Mind the Gap , Graham presents three reasons why we think wealth inequality is inherently bad:

The Daddy Model of Wealth: We confuse wealth with money and think there is a fixed amount of it. And if there’s a fixed amount, we believe it should be distributed equally. (By now, you should realize that wealth is different from money, and that you can create wealth; there is no “fixed amount” or “fixed pie”; you can increase the pie)
We think people get rich today like they got rich earlier: In the past, the rich people tended to get rich by stealing (through war or taxes). So some people still believe rich people have gotten rich by stealing, even though today the much better, more reliable, faster and legal way to get rich is by creating wealth, not stealing it.
We don’t understand leverage: Technology increases the gap between the productive and the unproductive, thus increasing wealth inequality. If a CEO is 100x richer than an employee in the same company, we think it unjust because there’s no way the CEO works 100x more than they do. But because of leverage, the CEO can easily be 100x more productive than an employee, or make decisions that are 100x more valuable. “I have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another.”

Wealth inequality can be a sign of good things.

“Variation in wealth can be a sign of variation in productivity. (In a society of one, they're identical.) And that is almost certainly a good thing: if your society has no variation in productivity, it's probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It's probably because you have no Thomas Edisons.

In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.” (From Great Hackers )

“By helping startup founders, you’re helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality should be decreased, no one should be helping founders. But that doesn’t sound right.” (From Economic Inequality )

There are many causes of economic inequality. Some of them are bad, like corruption and stealing. But some causes are generally good, like variation in productivity. Some people are vastly better at creating things people want, so it’s unsurprising they are able to make more money than other people.

Remember that startups grow the pie: they get rich by making other people richer. Because they are rich doesn’t mean you must have been screwed over. It’s more like the opposite: the Google founders are rich because they have made life easier and richer for billions of people.

Of course, wealth inequality isn't only due to startups (although startups create the most extreme results). Some people’s salaries are higher than others’, again, because some produce more wealth than others. Salaries are closer to market price than ever before , and get constantly closer, as people are more free to start their own companies, switch companies and work internationally.

Taxing the rich reduces economic inequality, but may not lead to the results you’d hope for.

If you want to make the poor richer - as is probably the intention when you want to reduce economic inequality - you can either take the money from the rich, or make the poor more productive so they’ll get richer (through education and infrastructure, for example). But if you make people more productive, some people will create 1,000x the results as another, so economic inequality remains.

So if you want to reduce economic inequality, the only way is to push from the top - to take money from the rich (see Inequality and Risk ). Thus, you reduce the rewards for creating or funding startups and business activity, thus you hinder technological innovation. This doesn’t sound as positive as “reducing economic inequality”. Especially when you consider the many different kinds of inequalities beyond income equality.

The gap between rich and poor is increasing in monetary terms, but probably closing in wealth terms. Today, the average person lives a relatively similar life, materially, to a rich person: both have a fridge, a car, a phone, Netflix… 100 years ago, the rich had a car while the poor didn’t, they had things we now regard as “essentials” while the poor didn’t. Through businesses, essential products are getting cheaper and more accessible to everyone. In many cases, the rich can pay to have a flashier version of something, like a sports car or brand watch, but the basic, affordable version is still good enough.

Today, the difference is appearance and what brand your stuff is; in the past, the difference was either having it or not having it. So yes, the income gap is increasing, but with it, the gap in quality of life is decreasing.

“You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.” (From Mind the Gap ) Trickle-down economics is a bad argument because it misses the point. We need to look at how wealth is created, not how it’s used

Graham’s proposition:

Allow those who create wealth to keep it.

When you’re allowed to keep the wealth you create, people can get rich by creating wealth instead of stealing it. People take bigger risks if they can keep more of the upside when those risks pay off. A startup founder never captures all of the wealth created; most of the wealth is transferred to other people, so we should encourage those who want to get rich, not discourage them.

Based on these ideas, you can probably guess Graham’s opinions on capitalism vs communism (something he discusses in the essays linked in this section, particularly in How to Make Wealth and Mind the Gap ).

Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false

“At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable.” (From Taste for Makers )

“And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.” (From Orthodox Privilege )

Not everything we think is true is true, and not everything we think is false is false.

Graham comes back to this idea repeatedly, particularly in the essays discussing independent-mindedness and conformism (see above). But you can see tones of this idea in his startup essays too; after all, a successful startup has a vision of a future that most other people do not believe in at the time.

Graham deep-dives into this idea in What You Can't Say , an essay I consider one of his finest - one you must read for yourself. In fact, the whole essay is so intellectually important that I’d do it a disservice by summarizing. Instead, here’s the main takeaway I was left with:

There are things you believe that are incorrect, horribly so. To you, they seem correct without question. Stay open-minded.

Paul Graham on Life

If we accept that writing is thinking (as we addressed earlier), Graham, with over 200 essays and decades of writing, has done a lot of thinking. When he shares life wisdom, you’d be smart to listen.

What You'll Wish You'd Known is sort of Paul Graham’s compilation of life wisdom, targeted at high school students. It’s also one of his most popular essays. While you should read it yourself, here are a few major points that stood out for me:

It’s okay to not have a plan. In fact, it may be better not to fixate on one plan when you’re young. Optimize for optionality. If you’re unsure, go with the option that gives you more options later down the line.
Build something. Work on something hard on your own, doesn’t really matter what it is. You’ll learn so much about yourself in that process. This is a shortcut to finding what you want to work on, which is one of the major questions in life. “If I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. [...] I should have spent less time worrying and more time building. If you're not sure what to do, make something.” (From The Power of the Marginal )
How you succeed in school is in no way representative of how you succeed in life. “One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them.” At school, stuff is forced on you; in real life, it is the stuff you initiate that matters and defines your trajectory.
“There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. That’s not how you become an adult. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [...] The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.”

Beyond that essay, there are a few bigger themes I want to highlight below.

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Life is Short

The Acceleration of Addictiveness

How to Lose Time and Money

Lies We Tell Kids

Keep Your Identity Small

Cities and Ambition

The Top of My Todo List

Life is short

“Life is short” is one of those statements everyone kind of agrees with, without giving it too much thought. But Graham has explored the idea a bit deeper.

For starters, a startup itself is a way to appreciate the shortness of life or adapt to it ; instead of a 40-year career, you compress your income-making to a few startup years and thus free up time for activities beyond making a living. The average human lifespan is increasing while the minimum possible time it takes to be set for life is decreasing; startups are one way to maximize the gap.

Whether you agree with the premise that Life is Short , it’s easy to agree that one way to make life seem less short is to minimize anything unimportant. If you do nothing for 5 hours, that 5 hours will feel excruciatingly long. The more we have going on, the shorter life feels. So we should cut all the things we don’t like doing, the stuff that we think life is too short for (Graham calls this, bluntly, “bullshit”).

And if we invert the argument, we realize that we should dedicate more time for the important stuff. If people and relationships are important to you, your calendar should reflect that. When life is short, we must ruthlessly cut the unimportant while making time for the important. Sounds simple and easy to dismiss, but somehow, Graham applies weight to it in Life is Short .

It’s surprisingly easy to waste your life if you’re not careful

Since life is short, it’s easy to let it slip away in a blur if you’re not careful.

One thing you get easily sucked into is “ anti-tests ”. These are tests you can try to excel in, but the way to come on top is to not care about the test at all, to ignore the test. So you could try to be popular in school, but you probably shouldn’t care about popularity; you can try to become important and high-status in life, but you probably shouldn’t care about that. Just because there’s a test doesn’t mean you should try to perform well in it.

Ignoring tests is especially hard for intelligent, ambitious people, because their ambition provides the motivation and intelligence the means to do well in the test. But try not to get sucked into the anti-tests in life; they are the kind of “bullshit” life is too short for.

Another thing that can corrode your life, if you’re not careful, is addiction. We know to be careful with the standard stuff like alcohol and gambling, but it’s harder to avoid addictions that everyone has because those seem normal to us. In The Acceleration of Addictiveness , Graham makes a division between two normals: statistically normal (that which everyone does) and operationally normal (that which works best). Being addicted to social media and your phone is statistically normal, but not operationally normal. “ Technology tends to separate normal from natural. ”

“ You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. ” For example, if your approach to consumerism doesn’t seem a bit weird, you probably own too much Stuff .

But being careful about pleasures and self-indulgence and “the bullshit” isn’t enough. We must also be careful about the things we do that feel important and productive. In How to Lose Time and Money , Graham writes:

“It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. Someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking ‘wow, I'm spending a lot of money.’ Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.”

Similarly, for a fairly ambitious person, it’s hard to waste your time by watching TV or laying on the sofa - your brain will start thinking “this is a waste of time” sooner or later. But you can easily work 12h a day for 2 years on something that, in retrospect, was a complete waste of your time.

If you’re not careful about where you invest your time and money, life passes by surprisingly easily.

You have a lot of unconditioning to do

What’s a lie you were told as a child? Stuff like “if you swallow an apple seed, a tree will grow in your stomach” is easy to identify as a lie. But stuff like “be careful with strangers, they are dangerous”? Less so.

In Lies We Tell Kids , Graham shows that we’ve been lied to as kids, for a variety of reasons (some better than others). Some falsities have flowed into our heads at home, some at school, but the main idea is that we’ve woven lies into our understanding of the world at a young age. And if it’s something we learned as a child, it feels undeniably true as an adult; it takes serious effort to take apart these deep-held beliefs.

As a rule, if you think it’s true because you learned it in school or in your childhood, assume it is not true. It’s better to verify it for yourself, even if it turns out to have been true all along.

If childhood beliefs are a good place to start unconditioning, a good place to continue is whatever you identify as (democrat, minimalist, crypto bull…). This is because we have a terribly hard time thinking clearly about something that’s part of our identity , so you may have taken in opinions one-sidedly. If you identify as x, criticism against x feels like a personal attack because x is a part of your identity, part of you. The bigger your identity, the more you have to process and rethink.

Another thing to uncondition comes from Cities and Ambition . When most people talk about the essay, they consider the obvious implication: you should go to the city that matches your ambition. So if you want to be in the show biz, go to Hollywood, or if you’re into startups, go to Silicon Valley (or, increasingly, the right corner of the internet). But there’s an inverse consideration, too, and it’s an important one: the places you’ve already lived in have subconsciously influenced your ambition. So, yes, we could match the city we live in to our ambition, but before we do that, we should figure out whether our ambition really is our own or if it’s simply a product of where we have lived in so far.

This idea of unconditioning links back to the earlier point: because you’ve been conditioned a certain way, you’re set on a path that you may not wish to be on, had you consciously made the choice. So unless you do uncondition yourself, it’s easy to waste your life.

You have a lot of unconditioning to do. So better get started.

Paul Graham’s 5 commandments for life

Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying:

Forgetting your dreams
Ignoring family
Suppressing emotions
Neglecting friends
Forgetting to be happy with what you have

In The Top of My Todo List , Graham inverted the regrets into his 5 commandments to live by:

Don’t ignore your dreams
Don’t work too much
Say what you think
Cultivate friendships

Paul Graham’s Best Essays

Paul Graham’s favorites ‍

This is in addition to the three that get the most traffic: https://t.co/zsxRpKm4ew https://t.co/nROmN4eyhO https://t.co/O8hIcjcMd2 I should also have included: https://t.co/CUBGEQ9N7H https://t.co/bAcAN5wROL https://t.co/MVTTJDzyQ2 https://t.co/OKZOGIhi4i — Paul Graham (@paulg) December 20, 2019

My favorites

What You Can't Say
How to Think for Yourself
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
How to Make Wealth

Final words

This has been nothing but a short introduction to Paul Graham’s ideas. There are so many essays and ideas and topics that weren’t included here, so, who knows, maybe at some point there will be a PG 201.

Anyhow, I hope this has inspired you to explore the essays yourself and gives you a convenient way to find the essays that interest you.

If you found this summary useful, please feel free to share around. It took me nearly a year to read all the essays and turn my notes into something useful, so it’d be awesome if many people knew about this.

And if there’s something you’d like to add / edit, reach out: [email protected] / Twitter

Thanks for reading.

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Summaries of Paul Graham's essays

See the originals here .

After The Ladder
An Alternative Theory of Unions
Cities and Ambition
How to Do What You Love
How to Get Startup Ideas
How to Make Wealth
How to Start a Startup
Inequality and Risk
Is It Worth Being Wise?
It's Charisma, Stupid
Schlep Blindness
Startup = Growth
Taste for Makers
The Age of the Essay
The Python Paradox
Two Kinds of Judgement
Undergraduation
What You Can't Say
What You'll Wish You'd Known
Why Nerds are Unpopular
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Why Startup Hubs Work
Writing and Speaking

Cities and Ambition

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Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent (Ep. 186)

Plus, his bizarre strategy for getting over a fear of flying..

Peter Thiel

Tyler and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham sat down at his home in the English countryside to discuss what areas of talent judgment his co-founder and wife Jessica Livingston is better at, whether young founders have gotten rarer, whether he still takes a dim view of solo founders, how to 2x ambition in the developed world, on the minute past which a Y Combinator interviewer is unlikely to change their mind, what YC learned after rejecting companies, how he got over his fear of flying, Florentine history, why almost all good artists are underrated, what’s gone wrong in art, why new homes and neighborhoods are ugly, why he wants to visit the Dark Ages, why he’s optimistic about Britain and San Fransisco, the challenges of regulating AI, whether we’re underinvesting in high-cost interruption activities, walking, soundproofing, fame, and more.

Watch the full conversation

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or your favorite podcast app to be notified when a new episode releases.

Recorded July 15th, 2023.

Read the full transcript

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler . Today I’m here with Paul Graham . Paul, welcome.

PAUL GRAHAM: Thank you.

COWEN: You’ve written several times that your wife, Jessica Livingstone , is a better judge of character than you are. What other areas of talent judgment is she better, or much better, than you?

GRAHAM: Practically everything to do with people. She’s a real expert on people and social protocol — what to wear at events, what to say to someone, [laughs] anything like that.

COWEN: But you have all this data, so why can’t you learn from the data and from her to do as well as she can? What’s the binding constraint here in limiting someone as a judge of human affairs?

GRAHAM: Well, partly, I just don’t have as much natural ability, and partly, I just don’t care as much about these things. The conversations we have are not “Paul, you can’t wear that.” They are like, “ Paul , you can’t wear that .” [laughs] I’m like, “Really? Why not? What’s wrong with this?” I just don’t care as much.

COWEN: But say, when you’re judging talent — Sam Altman , Patrick Collison — you’re judging people, right? Of course, it’s the business plan, but much of it is the talent.

GRAHAM: Oh, it’s all the people. The earlier you’re judging start-ups, the more you’re just judging the founders. It’s like location for real estate. The founders are like that, so yes, sure. Which is why the earlier stage you invest, the more you want to have these people who are good judges of people.

On judging people

COWEN: If she’s better than you at human affairs, comparing you to other people, what exactly, in the smallest number of dimensions, are you better at than the other people?

GRAHAM: What am I better at?

COWEN: Yes. What are you better at? You can’t be so terrible at this, right?

GRAHAM: You mean to do with start-ups?

COWEN: To do with people — how well they will do with their start-ups. What’s the exact nature of your comparative advantage?

GRAHAM: I can tell if people know what they’re talking about when they come and talk about some idea, especially some technical idea. I can tell if they know, if they actually understand [laughs] the idea, or if they just have a reading-the-newspaper level of understanding of the thing.

COWEN: How well can you judge determination?

GRAHAM: Determination — it’s hard to judge by looking at the person. The way you would judge determination — because people act determined; people think they’re supposed to act determined. No one walks into their Y Combinator interview thinking, “Well, I need to seem diffident.” [laughs] Nobody thinks that. They all think they’re supposed to seem tough, which is actually really painful and stressful. It’d be better if they just were themselves because someone trying to act tough — it’s so painful to watch.

But the way you tell determination is not so much from talking to them as from asking them stories about things that have happened to them. That’s where you can see determination.

COWEN: It’s how they tell the story, or it’s what happened?

GRAHAM: No, it’s what they did in the story, right?

COWEN: What they did in the story.

GRAHAM: Something went wrong, and instead of giving up, they persevered.

COWEN: Why are there so few great founders in their 20s today, saying that they are —

GRAHAM: Is that true, though? I’ve heard about that.

COWEN: Ten, fifteen years ago, you had a large crop of people who, obviously, have become massive successes. Today, it’s less clear. Companies seem to be smaller. The important people seem to be older. Sam Altman was important early on, but now he’s very, very, very important. He’s what, 37, 38?

GRAHAM: Something like that.

COWEN: Seems like more of a synthetic set of abilities we need.

GRAHAM: I’m not even sure this is true. It could be that it’s not actually true, and that there’s something else going on. If you look at athletes, for example, athletes learned how to stay good for longer. You have people who are really international quality soccer players at age 34. That didn’t used to happen back in the days of Johan Cruyff , smoking cigarettes between halves. [laughs] He didn’t last till 34. It might have seemed like all the good football players are 34, and it’s just an artifact of them lasting longer.

COWEN: But the 20-year-old stars seem to have vanished. There’s not a next Patrick Collison, who was evidently so.

GRAHAM: Well, Patrick Collison probably didn’t seem to most people to be the big star, and you can prove this, because if he had, they would have invested in early Stripe rounds, and they didn’t. Anybody who claims they knew early on that Patrick Collison was going to be a big star — show me the equity.

COWEN: Okay, but there was Peter Thiel , there was Sequoia , there was yourself. A bunch of people knew, in fact, or strongly suspected.

GRAHAM: Sure, yes. Some people did, but certainly not everyone. I don’t know if this is true. I’ll investigate this summer when we’re going to go back to YC and talk to some founders, and I’ll talk to the partners, and I’ll see what’s going on, because I had a mental note to check and see if this is actually true.

COWEN: There’s a Paul Graham worldview in your earlier essays, where you want to look for the great hackers , and a lot of the most important companies come from intriguing side projects.

GRAHAM: Oh, yes.

COWEN: But if we want older people who are somewhat synthetic in their abilities, are those other principles still true?

GRAHAM: No, not necessarily. Not as true. Part of the reason you want to find young founders who’ve done stuff from side projects is that it guarantees the idea is not bullshit. Because if young founders sit down and try to think of a start-up idea, it’s more likely to be bullshit because they don’t have any experience of the world.

Older founders can do things like start supersonic aircraft companies, or build something for geriatric care, and actually get it right. Younger founders are likely to get things wrong if they try and do stuff like that. It’s just a heuristic. It’s a heuristic for finding matches between young founders and ideas.

COWEN: Why is venture capital such a small part of capital markets? It’s big in tech, it’s somewhat big in biotech, but most other areas of the economy, you finance with debt or retained earnings or some other method. What determines where VC works and doesn’t work?

GRAHAM: Well, growth. You’ve got to have high growth rates because VCs — it’s so risky investing in start-ups, investing in these early-stage companies that maybe don’t even have any revenues. The only thing that can counterbalance the fact that [laughs] half the companies completely fail is that the ones that don’t fail sometimes have astonishing returns.

COWEN: Can you imagine a future where there’s a lot more tech in terms of the level, but slower rates of growth, and VC quite dwindles because the growth rates aren’t there? Or VC goes to some other area?

GRAHAM: Well, VC has been dwindling in the sense that they have smaller and smaller percentages of companies. If you go back and look at the stories from the 1980s, they would do these rounds where they would get 50 percent of the company. Even when YC started, they would get 30, and now it’s down to 10 in these rounds — God knows what they’re called; they keep renaming the rounds. For a given round size, the amount of equity they get is much smaller than they used to.

COWEN: It at least seems we have a new, dynamic Microsoft that ships products quickly and innovates and, on the surface, appears to act like a start-up again. How can that be true? We all know your famous essay about Microsoft culture . What has happened?

GRAHAM: I did not say that they wouldn’t make money.

COWEN: But they’ve done more than make money. They’ve impressed us with their speed.

GRAHAM: Well, I meant something very specific in that essay. Incidentally, I talk in that essay about how I was talking to a founder, and I was talking about how Microsoft was this threat. You can see he was clearly puzzled, like, how could Microsoft possibly be threatening? I didn’t mention who the founder was, but it was actually Zuck. It was Mark Zuckerberg, [laughs] who was puzzled that Microsoft could be a threat.

Still to this day, if you ask founders, “Are you afraid that Microsoft might do what you’re doing?” None of them are. It’s still not a threat to start-ups. Yes, it makes more money now, but it’s still not a threat like it used to be. It doesn’t matter in the sense of factoring into anyone’s plans for the future. No start-up is thinking, “Well, I better not do that because Microsoft might enter that and destroy me.”

On founders

COWEN: In the early years of Sam Altman, what did you see in him other than determination? Because he’s not a technical guy in the sense of —

GRAHAM: He is a technical guy. He was a CS major.

COWEN: But you’re not buying the software he programmed, right? There’s something about what Sam Altman does that —

GRAHAM: Well, now he’s become a manager, but he knows how to program.

COWEN: But that’s not why his ventures have succeeded, right?

GRAHAM: Oh, no, he does a lot more than —

COWEN: There’s some ability to put the pieces together.

GRAHAM: Yes, but he’s not a nontechnical guy. He’s not just some business guy. He’s a technical guy who also is very formidable, and that’s a good combination.

COWEN: There’s a now-famous Sam tweet where he appears to repudiate his earlier advice of finding product-market fit early and then scaling, and saying, “Oh, maybe I was wrong saying that.” What OpenAI has done is not exactly that. Do you agree, disagree?

GRAHAM: Well, maybe OpenAI is a special case because you have to have giant warehouses full of GPUs. You can’t just mess around and throw something out there [laughs] and see if it works. Maybe it requires some amount of advanced planning for something on that scale. I don’t know. I don’t know what he meant by it, and I also don’t know what it’s like inside OpenAI, really. I don’t know either.

COWEN: Do you still take a dim view of solo founders ?

GRAHAM: Well, it’s harder. I know I wouldn’t start a start-up alone because it’s just so much weight to bear to do something like that.

COWEN: But it’s very hard to find a partner as good as you are, right? It’s harder and it’s easier. You can just do it.

GRAHAM: Well, people should do some work. When I talk to people who are in their teens or early 20s about starting a start-up, I tell them, “Instead of sitting around thinking of start-up ideas, you should be working with other people on projects. Then, you’ll get a start-up idea out of it that you probably never would have thought of, and you’ll get a co-founder too.” I wish people would do more of that. You can get co-founders — just work with people on projects. You just can’t get co-founders instantly. You’ve got to have some patience.

On increasing ambition

COWEN: Why is there not more ambition in the developed world? Say we wanted to boost ambition by 2X. What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way?

GRAHAM: Boy, what a fabulous question. I wish you’d asked me that an hour ago, so I could have had some time to think about it between now and then.

COWEN: [laughs] You’re clearly good at boosting ambition, so you’re pulling on some lever, right? What is it you do?

GRAHAM: Oh, okay. How do I do it? People are, for various reasons — for multiple reasons — they’re afraid to think really big. There are multiple reasons. One, it seems overreaching. Two, it seems like it would be an awful lot of work. [laughs]

As an outside person, I’m like an instructor in some fitness class. I can tell someone who’s already working as hard as they can, “All right, push harder.”

It doesn’t cost me any effort. Surprisingly often, as in the fitness class, they are capable of pushing harder. A lot of my secret is just being the person who doesn’t have to actually do the work that I’m suggesting they do.

COWEN: How much of what you do is reshuffling their networks? There are people with potential. They’re in semi-average networks —

GRAHAM: Wait. That was such an interesting question. We should talk about that some more because that really is an interesting question. Imagine how amazing it would be if all the ambitious people can be more ambitious. That really is an interesting question. There’s got to be more to it than just the fact that I don’t have to do the work.

COWEN: I think a lot of it is reshuffling networks. You need someone who can identify who should be in a better network. You boost the total size of all networking that goes on, and you make sure those people with potential —

GRAHAM: By reshuffling networks, you mean introducing people to one another?

COWEN: Of course.

GRAHAM: Yes.

COWEN: You pull them away from their old peers, who are not good enough for them, and you bring them into new circles, which will raise their sights.

GRAHAM: Eh, maybe. That is true. When you read autobiographies, there’s often an effect when people go to some elite university after growing up in the middle of the countryside somewhere. They suddenly become more excited because there’s a critical mass of like-minded people around. But I don’t think that’s the main thing. I mean, that is a big thing.

COWEN: Think of it as the power of London in the 17th century. The Industrial Revolution happens further north, but the ideas, the science, in or near London, maybe Cambridge.

GRAHAM: And Oxford.

COWEN: Those are the networks people are brought.

GRAHAM: Near London only in the sense that everything in England is near everything else by American standards. It’s not really that London was the center of ideas. There were a lot of smart people there, but things were more spread out. Be careful with English history there.

Back to this idea, though, of how to get people to be more ambitious. It’s not just introducing them to other ambitious people. There is a skill to blowing up ideas, blowing up not in the sense of destroying, like making them bigger. There is a skill to it, to take an idea and say, “Okay, so here’s an idea. How could this be bigger?” There is somewhat of a skill to it.

COWEN: It’s helping people see their ideas are bigger than they thought.

GRAHAM: Yes . Oh, yes. We often do this in YC interviews .

COWEN: People say you’re especially good at that. This is what the other people say.

GRAHAM: Well, that’s why I’m mulling over what actually goes on, because there is this skill there. The weird thing about YC interviews is, in a sense, they’re a negotiation. In a negotiation, you’re always saying, “Oh, I’m not going to pay a lot for that. It’s terrible. It’s worthless.” Yet in YC interviews, the founders often walk out thinking, “Wow, our idea is a lot better than we thought,” just because of what we do.

You know what we do in YC interviews? We basically start YC, the first 10 minutes of YC is the interview. You see what it’s like to work with people by working with them for 10 minutes, and that’s enough, it turns out.

COWEN: So, you think the 11th minute of an interview has very low value.

GRAHAM: I’ve thought a lot about where the cutoff is. Like, where’s the point? If you made a graph, what’s your probability of changing your mind after minute number N? After minute number one or two, the probability of changing your mind is pretty high. I would say YC interviews could actually be seven minutes instead of ten minutes, but ten minutes is already almost insultingly short, so we kept it at ten. We could have made it seven.

COWEN: I think there’s often a threshold of two, and then another threshold at about seven, and after that, it’s very tough for it to flip.

GRAHAM: Yes. Although that doesn’t mean you’re always right.

COWEN: It could just be, after three hours, you would still be wrong.

GRAHAM: It’s just not going to flip. I didn’t say seven minutes is enough to tell, notice. [laughs] I said seven minutes is the point where you’re probably not going to change your mind.

COWEN: If it’s going somewhat badly, and the person is flipping positive at minute six, what is it that’s happening, both in the interview and in you?

GRAHAM: If it changes from two to seven, uh —

COWEN: Clearly, from zero to one or two, they get over nerves, or they adjust the sound volume. There are plenty of those stories.

GRAHAM: It’s probably that we misunderstood what they’re working on initially.

COWEN: So, great idea, bad at presenting it?

GRAHAM: No, more like they’re near some idea that we’re familiar with, and we just assume they must be doing that idea. And they say, “Oh, no, no, no, we’re not doing that . We’re doing this.” I’m like, “Oh, okay. Thank goodness.” Then, they get extra points because not only they’re not doing the stupid thing, but they understand that the stupid thing is stupid. They get extra credit for what we were subtracting for it in the past.

COWEN: Who falls through the cracks in the YC process, as you’ve experienced it?

GRAHAM: Well, YC — one of the reasons I’m so contemptuous of university admissions is that I am also in the admissions business. I am obsessed. [laughs] We not only measure when we fail, but we’re obsessed with the failure cases. YC has a list of all the companies that we’ve missed, that have applied to YC and we’ve turned down, and they’ve gone on to be successful . We spend a lot of time, like someone thinking about past injuries.

COWEN: What’s the common element, though, now that you think of it?

GRAHAM: When there are common elements, my God, do we act quickly to fix that. I remember early on, there was this company doing email, if you wanted to send mass emails. I forget what their name was. This was back when we were reading the applications. If the first reader gave it a sufficiently low grade, it would never be seen by anybody else.

The first reader was Robert Morris . He was designated wet blanket of YC. He gave this application a C, with the comment “spam company.”

Nobody ever saw it again. They ended up going public. After that, I changed that thing in the software that made it so that no second reader would see it. After that, every application had to be seen by at least two people.

On getting over the fear of flying

COWEN: How did you get over your fear of flying?

GRAHAM: Oh, really? Did I already talk about this? Do you know the answer to this?

COWEN: There are two or three places in your writing where you mentioned that you had a fear of flying, but you used the past tense, which implies you got over it, but you never told anyone how.

GRAHAM: Well, it’s a bizarre strategy. I learned how to hang glide, which sounds crazy.

COWEN: [laughs] That will do it, though, right?

GRAHAM: If you’re afraid of flying, how could you learn how to hang glide? The answer is, you learn how to hang glide gradually. You start by just running along the flat. If there’s a headwind, maybe you feel a little lift. Then you go 10 feet up the hill, run as fast as you can, and you reach a total altitude above ground level of like a foot. You’re not afraid when you’re a foot above the ground. You go out a little further up the hill until a month later, you’re jumping off a cliff with a hang glider on your back.

After I was good at hang gliding, I took flying lessons. There’s this intermediate point where I was totally comfortable jumping off a cliff with a hang glider on my back, moderately comfortable flying a Cessna 172 — where the instructor had just turned off the engine [laughs] and said, “Okay, land it,” because the glide ratio is actually similar to a hang glider — and still afraid of getting on an airliner.

That shows you how irrational these things are. But when I finally did get on an airliner, my God, it was like a spaceship [laughs] compared to the planes I’d been flying. It was fabulous. It totally worked. My fear of flying was completely cured.

COWEN: What did you learn about start-ups and talent selection from that process?

GRAHAM: Boy, if I learned anything, I haven’t considered it until this moment.

COWEN: But you might have learned it quite well, just not articulated it.

GRAHAM: I don’t know. You ask me these hard questions. I don’t have time to think about them. I don’t think I’ve ever consciously used anything I learned there. It was certainly convenient to be able to —

COWEN: Do you see founders who go through a comparable process with something other than flying, and it’s like, “Oh, I get where you’re at, and here’s what you need to do next.”

GRAHAM: Yes, a lot of technical-type founders hate the idea of doing sales and going and talking to people, and so you can tell them, “Look, just go do this.” You know, after a few months, they’ll be used to it. They may never like it. I would hate doing that myself now, but they can at least do it.

On Florence

COWEN: Were the Medici good venture capitalists, or do you give greater credit to the Florentine guilds?

GRAHAM: I have no idea. I need to learn more about the —

COWEN: The guilds would run competitions. The Medici would just pick the people they liked. They both have good records in different ways, but obviously, they’re competing models.

GRAHAM: You’re an economist. You’ve read books about this stuff. I don’t know. What do I know about the Medici? [laughs]

COWEN: I think the Medici were overrated, and the guilds were more important, but that’s a debatable view. You could argue it either way.

GRAHAM: They could well be overrated. They were the ones who had all the publicity. I have no idea.

COWEN: Your time spent at RISD and in Florence — how did it alter or affect your thoughts on software design and talent selection?

GRAHAM: Man, if you asked how it affected my ideas about painting , I can give you an answer.

COWEN: We’ll get to that, but Florence was all about talent selection because how many people in quite a small area became both great and famous?

GRAHAM: One thing I remember — there was one moment I was sitting in Florence, and I realized I had gone to the wrong place. Because I was studying Florentine history, all the buildings are right around you, and I found myself thinking, “Damn, Florence was New York City [laughs] in 1450.”

COWEN: That was 60,000 people, yes.

GRAHAM: That’s why it was good at art. It wasn’t some weird Florentine thing about art or some special Florentine sense of aesthetics. They were just the most progressive city. It’s really too bad that the far left has hijacked that word. It’s such a good word. Maybe we can get it back.

GRAHAM: I remember thinking, “I’ve gone to the wrong place.” I went to the place where the puck used to be over hundreds of years ago. [laughs]

COWEN: You can learn a lot from studying where the puck used to be.

GRAHAM: Oh, not really.

COWEN: Are you sure?

GRAHAM: The Academia was a pretty crappy art school.

COWEN: Being in Florence itself had —

GRAHAM: Oh, I can learn a lot from looking at the works, but I don’t have to go and live there.

COWEN: What is it you learned that was relevant for Y Combinator? Because you’re doing something comparable to what the Florentines did: picking a pretty small area, making it the absolute center for talent selection, a magnet that drew people in, and having a lot of winners. You copied what you were living.

GRAHAM: I had already learned that from Harvard.

COWEN: Maybe you had to learn it twice. [laughs]

GRAHAM: No, no, no. I was already very well aware of this phenomenon, to the extent YC uses anything like that. We were definitely thinking. YC was started within the convex hull of Harvard, [laughs] like the places Harvard spread out through Cambridge, but YC’s original office was within it. We’ve consciously tried to make YC the Harvard of start-ups. No question about that. We had the model right there.

COWEN: Harvard’s very screwed up, as you know. You look at their admissions — how much is dean’s favorites and legacies and affirmative action? It’s not Y Combinator. They’re trying to build a coalition, and you’re just caring about picking winners.

GRAHAM: The thing is, though, all universities have an admissions process that’s corrupt in that way, except possibly Caltech. Caltech might actually do undergrad admissions properly. So, since they’re all messed up, Harvard does still have this draw compared to the others.

On AI and painting

COWEN: Does AI make programming even more like painting?

GRAHAM: God, what a question. How do you make these questions? Does AI make programming more like painting? I have no reason to believe that. [laughs] It might be true.

COWEN: You’re piecing things together more, arguably, in this new post-GPT world.

GRAHAM: Well, what I was seeing when I said programming was like painting is that they’re both building something. You’re not building something any more with AI than when you were writing code by hand, so I would guess not.

COWEN: How far is Midjourney from “real art”?

GRAHAM: I don’t know.

COWEN: Is it more decrepit modernism? Is it a fantastic revolution? Or, as art — put aside the start-up angle — how do you view it?

GRAHAM: Well, I see all these AI-generated images, and I don’t know which ones are from Midjourney and which ones aren’t. I can’t say for sure about Midjourney, but I have definitely seen some AI-generated stuff that looks amazing, that looks truly impressive.

COWEN: As art. Not just that it looks impressive. It’s amazing as graphic design, but do you think it’s art in the same way that Rembrandt is art?

GRAHAM: This whole thing about what’s art and what isn’t? I think it’s all a matter of degree. My crap carnation coffee mug is art. It’s just not very good art. [laughs] There’s not some threshold, where above this threshold it’s art. Everything people make is art, just to varying degrees of goodness. I can tell you, some of the things I’ve seen that were AI-generated, I’d be impressed if a person made them. That probably is over your threshold.

COWEN: If you’re good at talent selection, who is an underrated painter and why?

GRAHAM: Ah, wow. [laughs] Boy, there is a topic I think about a lot. There’s a bunch of different reasons people can be underrated. Almost all good artists are underrated.

COWEN: I agree.

GRAHAM: It sounds weird, but if you look at where the money’s spent at auction, it’s almost all fashionable contemporary crap because if you think about how prices in very high-end art are set, they’re auction prices. How many people does it take to generate an auction price? Two . Just two. So, you have boneheaded Russians who want to have a Picasso on their wall so people will think they’re legit, or hedge fund managers’ wives who’ve been told to buy impressive art to hang in their loft so when people come over, they’ll say, “Oh, look, they’ve got a Damien Hirst .”

The way art prices at the very high end are set is almost entirely by deeply bogus people, [laughs] which is great , actually. When I was an artist, I used to be annoyed by this. Now that I buy a lot of art at auction, I’m delighted because it means there’s all this money. You see Andy Warhol’s screen prints selling for $90 million.

COWEN: Yes. Old masters can be, I wouldn’t say cheap, but I would say radically underpriced.

GRAHAM: A couple hundred thousand.

COWEN: Or even less for some good ones.

GRAHAM: Yes, I know because I buy them. [laughs] I used to be annoyed by this, and now I think it’s the most delightful thing in the world because there’s all this loose money sloshing around, and so-called contemporary art is like this sponge that just absorbs all of it. There’s none left. Some of the things I buy, I am the only bidder. I get it for the reserve price. No one else in the world wants it, or even knows that it’s being sold, so I am delighted about this.

The answer to your question, which artists are undervalued? Essentially, all good artists. The very, very, very famous artists, artists famous enough for Saudis to have heard of them — Leonardo, I would say, is probably not undervalued. But except for the artists who are household names — every elementary school student knows their names — they’re all undervalued.

COWEN: If you think that something has gone wrong in the history of art, and you tried to explain that in as few dimensions as possible, what’s your account of what went wrong?

GRAHAM: Oh, I can explain this very briefly. Brand and craft became divorced. It used to be that the best artists were the best craftspeople. Once art started to be reproduced in newspapers and magazines and things like that, you could create a brand that wasn’t based on quality.

COWEN: So, you think it’s mass media causing the divorce between brand and craft?

GRAHAM: It certainly helps.

COWEN: Then talent’s responding accordingly. Fundamentally, what went wrong?

GRAHAM: You invent some shtick, right?

COWEN: Right.

GRAHAM: And then — technically, it’s called a signature style — you paint with this special shtick. If someone can get some ball rolling, some speculative ball rolling, which dealers specialize in, then someone buys the painting with your shtick and hangs it on the wall in their loft in Tribeca. And people come in and say, “Oh, my goodness, that’s a so and so,” which they recognize because they’ve seen this shtick. [laughs]

COWEN: Say, if we have modernism raging in the 1920s, and the ’20s mass media is radio for the most part —

GRAHAM: No, no, no, newspapers were huge. Modernism was well —

COWEN: But not for showing paintings, right? There’s no color in the papers. You had to be —

GRAHAM: Well, the 1920s were good enough to make painting like Cezanne fashionable. It was just about getting going in the 1920s.

COWEN: Why can’t we build good British country homes anymore?

GRAHAM: [laughs]

COWEN: Or do you think we can?

GRAHAM: Well, there’s nothing stopping you —

COWEN: But it doesn’t happen, right?

GRAHAM: — except the planning people. Do you know anything about building houses in England? You just cannot build.

COWEN: It’s impossibly difficult. It’s one of the worst countries, right?

GRAHAM: Well, it’s the reason it looks so nice here.

COWEN: Yes.

GRAHAM: If they had America’s zoning rules here, the entire countryside would be plastered with houses. You wouldn’t have any fields left at all because the difference in value between agricultural and building land — it’s like, God, 100X or something like that, and this place is small .

COWEN: Yes, but there are new buildings, say, in Cambridge, many other parts of Britain, and the new buildings are not country homes. Yet everyone, on average, is wealthier. Why the change?

GRAHAM: Wealthier than where?

COWEN: Wealthier than Britain in the old days. Even before the railway, you have large numbers of country homes, and most country homes being built when living standards were pathetically low.

GRAHAM: A country house has got to have a certain amount of land around it. You can’t just have them plastered down a street. It would look wrong. You want a different style of architecture or something like that. There is a place where they build big houses.

You know what it is? It’s like when the Macintosh appeared, and you could have whatever font you wanted, right? Most people have bad tastes. In the old days, you had to have a classical-looking house because that was the only way to build houses. In the Victorian period, actually, was when things went wrong. You could have an Italian villa, or wait, no, it could be a Greek temple, or [laughs] something that looked like it was from the Tudor period. Take your pick and mix them together, Greek temple with Tudor bits. It was all over from that point on, really.

It’s not like they build good houses in America either.

COWEN: No, neighborhoods are worse yet. There are nice individual homes, but is there any truly beautiful neighborhood built after 1950? Where would it be? In any country, put aside Asia?

GRAHAM: No, in Palo Alto, there are neighborhoods of houses built by this guy called Eichler , this developer who hired some of the best midcentury architects. And arguably, those neighborhoods are good, although they messed up the trees.

COWEN: When were those built?

GRAHAM: ’50s and ’60s.

COWEN: Okay, but that’s 70 years ago. Now, I mean, we haven’t done anything in 70 years? What’s your model of that?

GRAHAM: I’m sure someone is building some good houses somewhere. The point is, you don’t really need to, and so it only happens by accident. The developers mostly are thinking, “We need to just turn this land into houses as soon as possible. The buyers don’t have any taste. We don’t need to sweat that, so we’ll just build random houses that look big and have large master bedrooms. People will buy them. We’ll get our capital back and go on and do the next one.”

They don’t need to be good. Houses don’t need to be good. They didn’t need to be beautiful in the old days, either. It was just technology was so constrained, you didn’t have any choice.

On traveling back in time

COWEN: You get to go back in time. Your health is guaranteed, and you know whichever languages you might need, and you spend six months somewhere safe. Your safety is guaranteed. Where do you choose?

GRAHAM: I often think about this question.

COWEN: You seem like someone who often thinks about this question.

GRAHAM: Yes, sadly, the way I think about it is, I keep trying to escape from the obvious answer, and I don’t manage to, because the obvious answer to that is Athens, right? Which is, that’s where everyone would pick.

COWEN: It’s not what I would pick, but what’s your choice number two, then? I’ll tell you mine, I think.

GRAHAM: Well, there are things where I am obsessed with the mystery of what the hell was going on in Dark Age Europe. I’m deliberately using the term “Dark Age” because they’re trying to outlaw it. [laughs]

COWEN: It’s correct, I think.

GRAHAM: If the term “Dark Ages” hadn’t been invented already, that would be a fabulous invention to describe that period. Yes, sure, new things were getting invented. Some people were doing good things just like always happens. But it was as bad as things have been. There are so few records, nobody knows how things happened.

I would be really interested to know when barbarians infilled the Roman Empire, but there were still big Roman landholders, and they had to give a large percentage of their estates to these new barbarians, who were in a sense running things. They were in the cockpit, but they didn’t know what the buttons did.

COWEN: You want to go to Northumbria or northern France? Or where do you want to be?

GRAHAM: No, no.

COWEN: Dark Ages — you’ve picked the era, now give us the spot.

GRAHAM: Like Provence.

COWEN: Provence?

GRAHAM: Provence in 600. What was going on? What was going on in Provence in 600? I would be very interested to see that. Almost like morbid curiosity. I wouldn’t learn as much as I would in going to Athens, [laughs] but I just really want to know what was going on.

COWEN: I’m a big fan of morbid curiosity, by the way. It’s the best kind of curiosity, in many cases.

GRAHAM: I can tell.

COWEN: I would pick the Aztec Empire before the Spanish arrived. I feel I have vague glimpses of what ancient Athens was like. There are still Greek ruins. The Europeans marveled at the cities they saw, and they burnt all the books, and I think I would learn more by somewhere more strange.

GRAHAM: Maybe, maybe. The reason I’m interested in medieval Europe is, it’s where our world came from — the clocks we use, the writing system, all the clothes eventually evolved from that. The reason I’m interested — I long ago realized that the medieval period wasn’t a dip. It wasn’t like there was this high level of civilization, and then it dropped down for a while, and then it rose back up again.

It was more like there was one civilization that was high and went down, and another civilization based in the north that rose up. In a sense, it was the beginning of everything. That’s why I want to know what the hell was going on in 600 or 700.

COWEN: Did Rome have to fall? Or can you imagine a path where Rome has an industrial revolution, and we save ourselves 700 or however many centuries of time? Like you need the fragmentation to get the competition for Britain to become significant?

GRAHAM: Maybe, maybe. I don’t know. Oh, 2,000 years is a long time, or even 1,700 years. Actually, Roman was half decent —

COWEN: Because China never falls.

GRAHAM: — until 200, so, 1,500 years. But 1,500 years — things could have changed a lot.

COWEN: But did they in China? Chinese Empire never collapses. It takes many forms, many dynasties, but it ends up stalling. So maybe the collapse of the Roman Empire was one of the best things that could have happened, for Europe, at least.

GRAHAM: I’m sure people didn’t think so at the time. People were thinking at the time, “It didn’t have to be this bad.” [laughs] I don’t know. Neither of us knows about this kind of thing.

COWEN: Looking forward, how optimistic are you about the future of the UK? No real wage growth since 2008, no real productivity growth for as many years. What’s up, and what’s the path out of that?

GRAHAM: I am optimistic because they still have a gear that they haven’t shifted into. I suppose I’ll really have gotten native when I say “we” instead of “they.”

COWEN: [laughs] But you grew up in Pittsburgh, right? Near Pittsburgh.

GRAHAM: Yes, but I’m British by birth.

COWEN: Does that count? Are you really British, or your parents were diplomats here?

GRAHAM: No, no, no. Yes, I’m really British.

COWEN: You’re really British?

GRAHAM: Yes, yes. Just ask HMRC. As far as they’re concerned, I never left. [laughs] HMRC is the British IRS.

Okay, the reason I’m optimistic about Britain — I was just thinking about this this morning — is because people here are not slack. They’re not lazy, and they’re not stupid, and that’s the most important thing. Eventually, non-lazy, non-stupid people will prevail.

I’ve funded a couple of start-ups here. You can see, when you introduce these people to the idea of trying to make something grow really fast and have these really big ambitions, it’s like teaching them a foreign language, but they do learn it. They do learn it. It’s not like English people are somehow genetically inferior to Americans. I think they have all that potential still to go. I’m astonished when I see statistics. I think GDP per capita in the UK is only two-thirds of what it is in America.

COWEN: It’s about the same as Mississippi.

GRAHAM: It’s preposterous , I know. Imagine the potential there. Imagine the potential.

COWEN: You don’t feel that way about Mississippi, necessarily?

GRAHAM: No, I think Mississippi’s probably already up close to its full potential. I don’t know. I’ve never actually been there. I shouldn’t say things like that.

COWEN: Why and how did so many things here end up undercapitalized? The water utilities, the NHS — it seems to be a consistent pattern. That could make us more pessimistic because the flow numbers don’t reflect the fact that capital maintenance is even worse than we had thought.

GRAHAM: I don’t know. You’re an economist. I don’t know what the term capital maintenance means.

COWEN: But you’re a British person, I’m told.

GRAHAM: Undercapitalized — I don’t know what these things mean.

COWEN: They’ve been postponed.

GRAHAM: The NHS is run by the government, so things run by governments are often bad. Although the NHS seems to be pretty good. Even though people attack it, it’s a lot more civilized than the American system.

COWEN: How long it takes an ambulance to arrive if you call one up?

GRAHAM: Well, that’s only recently got bad. That’s just in the last couple of years.

COWEN: That’s what undercapitalization means. You keep on borrowing against the future. You don’t plow resources back in, and then at some point you don’t have anymore.

GRAHAM: Actually, when things get bad enough, they fix things. This place is not run by the kind of yahoos that America is. It may be a small country, but people running things — they’re not just boneheaded political appointees. [laughs] When things are wrong, they notice they’re wrong, and they fix them. This is a very old country. That’s another reason it’s not going to tank. They’ve been through some bad stuff before. There have been ups and downs.

On optimism for San Francisco

COWEN: Are you an optimist about the city of San Francisco? Not the area, the city.

GRAHAM: Yes , I am.

COWEN: Tell us why.

GRAHAM: I can’t tell you because there are all sorts of things happening behind the scenes to fix the problem.

COWEN: In politics, you mean, or in tech start-ups?

GRAHAM: No, no, no, politics. The problems with San Francisco are entirely due to a small number of terrible politicians. It’s all because Ed Lee died. The mayor, Ed Lee, was a reasonable person. Up till the point where Ed Lee died, San Francisco seemed like a utopia. It was like when Gates left Microsoft, and things rapidly reverted to the mean. Although in San Francisco’s case, way below the mean, and so it’s not that it didn’t take that much to ruin San Francisco. It’s really, if you just replaced about five supervisors, San Francisco would be instantly a fabulously better city.

COWEN: Isn’t it the voters you need to replace? Those people got elected, reelected.

GRAHAM: Well, the reason San Francisco fundamentally is so broken is that the supervisors have so much power, and supervisor elections, you can win by a couple hundred votes. All you need to do is have this hard core of crazy left-wing supporters who will absolutely support you, no matter what, and turn out to vote.

Everybody else is like, “Oh, local election doesn’t matter. I’m not going to bother.” [laughs] It’s a uniquely weird situation that wasn’t really visible. It was always there, but it wasn’t visible until Ed Lee died. Now, we’ve reverted to what that situation produces, which is a disaster.

COWEN: Now, we’re in 2023. Say, two or three years from now, what do you think the regulation of AI will look like?

GRAHAM: Oh, God knows. You keep asking me questions I have no idea about.

COWEN: You have plenty of ideas. You know as much as anyone, I suspect.

GRAHAM: No, that’s not true. That is not true. [laughs] I really have no idea what AI regulation will look like, or even should look like, which is an easier question.

COWEN: Here’s an easier question, yes. There is a broadly tech community in the Bay Area.

GRAHAM: If you said I had to make up the regulations for AI this afternoon, it would be really hard.

GRAHAM: [laughs] That’s how far away I am from being able to answer that question on the spot. I couldn’t even figure it out in a day.

COWEN: Like when it should be modular, or when there should be a regulation on AI is a thing that itself is intractable.

Making safe AGI is like writing a secure operating system. It's hard to do it, and it's easy to convince yourself you've done it. Anyone who actually manages to do it, knows that it's hard. If you've written an OS and you think making it secure was easy, that thing ain't secure — Rob Miles (@robertskmiles) April 29, 2023

GRAHAM: I’ll tell you one meta fact though. There was a guy on Twitter — I think his name was Rob Miles — who said that trying to make safe AI will be like trying to make a secure operating system.

That is absolutely true, and therefore frightening, because the way you make a secure operating system is not by sitting down and thinking at a table with a piece of paper about the principles for making a secure operating system. More like you try and make such principles, and then someone hacks your operating system. [laughs] Then you think, “Oh, okay, sorry.” You patch it, and then they hack that.

Making a secure operating system is like making a fraud-proof tax code. It’s basically a series of patches that were based on successful hacks. Is it Mellon ? They say the US tax code is, basically, a series of responses to things Mellon did.

COWEN: Some parts of it, yes.

GRAHAM: Secure operating systems are like that . I’m worried about AI because you’re not going to be able to figure out — whatever the regulations are, they’ll be wrong, I’ll tell you that. They’ll be overregulated in some ways, and miss and just have huge holes in others.

COWEN: There’s a Bay Area tech community. At least in the not-too-distant past, they agreed about many things, but very recently, it seems, on AI, there’s quite a divergence of views. People who are very, very worried: “Oh, it’s going to kill us all in the world.” People who say, “Oh, there are problems, but this is going to be great.”

In as few dimensions as possible, what accounts for that difference in perspective from people with broadly similar backgrounds, and who used to agree on many things? Is it temperament? Is it genes? Is it like a snake bit when —

GRAHAM: It’s probably which aspect of the problem they choose to focus on. You could focus on either one. If you focus on how it could be good, there are all sorts of exciting things to discover, and you discover lots of genuine ways it could be good. If you focus on how it could be bad, it’s true there, too. So it could be either.

I manage to keep both thoughts in my head simultaneously. I simultaneously think there will be all kinds of good things and all kinds of bad things. They will be unimaginably good and unimaginably bad. [laughs] It sounds like that produces oscillation, doesn’t it?

GRAHAM: That’s worrying. That in itself is worrying.

COWEN: Why hasn’t Lisp been more successful? Or do you think it has?

GRAHAM: Well, Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and Clojure’s very successful, so it’s been successful in that respect. There’s another way it’s been successful. Some languages that are not considered dialects of Lisp, like JavaScript — if you showed JavaScript to people in 1970, they would say, “This is a Lisp. Except for the syntax, this is a Lisp.” It’s literally successful through Clojure. It’s de facto successful through JavaScript.

But why doesn’t everybody use Clojure or some other dialect of Lisp? Because the notation is frightening. There’s an initial hump with the notation, and if you give people initial hump — you must know about this. There must be names for this in economics.

If you put some sort of obstacle, like a container, right in front of people’s front door, they’ll go off to the left, and then they won’t go right back in front of the container and resume their original path. No, they’ll take this other path that goes miles out of their way, just because of that one block in front of their front door. The syntax, the reverse Polish notation , puts people off.

COWEN: Is AI-generated programming going to vindicate you on Lisp over time, or cousins of Lisp?

COWEN: Because the AI doesn’t care about the notation, right?

GRAHAM: It does .

COWEN: It does?

GRAHAM: Because it’s trained based on the amount of code that’s out there.

COWEN: But you could train it on something more like Lisp if you wanted to.

GRAHAM: You can’t. You have to train on actual examples people have written.

COWEN: But you have AI write some code in a perpetual motion machine, train other AIs on that code, and converge to something better, better, better. No?

GRAHAM: There was some research paper recently, where they trained an AI on the output of AIs, and it converges on crap. Maybe there’ll be some solution because it is a very rapidly evolving field, but I think you have to have a large corpus, initially, of examples written in the language.

COWEN: Other than hackers and hacking, what other human activities are what you have called high-cost interruption ? That is, if you’re interrupted, you lose your train of thought, have to start all over again.

GRAHAM: Oh, math, I think must be like that. I think anything .

COWEN: Painting — yes, or no?

GRAHAM: Not as much in my experience, not as much. You don’t have to think ahead as much in painting. It’s annoying to be interrupted, no matter what, but it doesn’t absolutely destroy you, like it does in the middle of writing a program or something. You don’t build a big mental model of something in your head when you’re painting. That’s what it is. It’s when you’ve got this giant house of cards in your head. That’s when you get destroyed by an interruption.

COWEN: Do you think kids today spend too much or too little time learning high-cost interruption activities?

GRAHAM: Do they spend too much or too little time working —

COWEN: Like, are we underinvesting in high-cost interruption activities?

GRAHAM: Well, if you think about what it’s like in schools, kids are constantly being interrupted, and they always have been.

GRAHAM: So, whatever the answer is, it’s not going to be kids these days. It will be a statement about school for centuries. Kids have such short attention spans. The one thing they can’t do is things that are big and long. I think if you said, “Okay, you have five hours to sit in a quiet room and build something,” I don’t think they’d be up to it, anyway.

On the Paul Graham production function

COWEN: Our last segment is what I call the Paul Graham production function, which is how you got to be Paul Graham. Would you major in philosophy again at Cornell, if you were doing it all over?

GRAHAM: No, I would not major in philosophy.

COWEN: Why not? Didn’t it allow you to think at a very general level?

GRAHAM: Well, it’s hard to say. It’s hard to say. It’s good to be able to take ideas and flip them around like a Rubik’s Cube, and take them apart, and notice the two parts are the same shape or something like that, but I don’t think I actually learned that in philosophy classes. I think I would’ve learned that in classes about anything hard.

I mistakenly thought that you could just go and learn the most abstract truths. It sounds great to a high school student. “Why do I have to learn all the specific crap? I’ll just learn the most general truths.” Needless to say, that’s one of those things that sounds too good to be true, and it is, because if you go and look in philosophy classes . . .

I remember when Bill Clinton was saying, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” I’m like, “Hey, that’s what I majored in, [laughs] what the meaning of ‘is’ is, literally.” I think it was pretty much a waste.

COWEN: Which kinds of ideas come more naturally to you while you’re walking?

GRAHAM: Which kinds?

COWEN: Yes. Maybe not painting ideas, but some kind of ideas, because you’ve written about how using walking to learn ideas is a good thing, but which kinds of ideas? There’s cross-sectional variation, right?

GRAHAM: Yes. Well, ideas about whatever you’re thinking about. I remember, until a few years ago, I was working very intensely on programming. I had the problem I was working on loaded into my head, and whenever I was doing something without any interruptions, I would start to think about that, so I think it’s good for whatever you happen to be thinking about. Mathematicians, apparently, walk a lot.

COWEN: I find it best for learning from what the other person knows, not so good from my own ideas. It’s better —

GRAHAM: What, when you’re walking with someone else?

COWEN: With someone else, and I’m talking with them, and I learn from them better. I don’t find that I’m very generative when I’m walking.

GRAHAM: Walking makes all kinds of thinking better. I’ve seen images — like MRI images or something like that — of brain activity. I don’t know how they do MRI images, [laughs] but some kind of images of brain activity. Your brain is definitely more active when you’re walking . Classic YC office hours were to walk down the block and talk as you walk, which also has the side benefit that you are side-by-side, and not looking the other person in the face, which I think may be better. It’s certainly better than —

COWEN: It’s less threatening. It’s like confession in the church. You don’t see the priest. Or you’re on a therapist’s couch — probably you’re not looking right at them, and vice versa.

GRAHAM: Or you’re driving your kid back to boarding school. You’re taking kids —

COWEN: And they’ll say things they would not otherwise have told you.

GRAHAM: Or talk at all. [laughs]

COWEN: What are the best environments for learning while walking? Urban, British countryside, or —

GRAHAM: Oh, my God.

COWEN: How do you optimize this dose?

GRAHAM: I actually have —

COWEN: I think Britain is wonderful for learning while walking because it’s never too hot. You heat up while you’re walking.

GRAHAM: It doesn’t pour with rain on you like it did today? I was drenched today.

COWEN: It ends in four minutes. You can bring an umbrella. You run to the gazebo, but there is a gazebo.

GRAHAM: There was no gazebo where I was this morning.

I think it’s good to always walk in the same place. You don’t want to see things that distract you. If you’re trying to have ideas, you’re not going to get ideas from things you see. Probably not. Not relevant ones. You want to walk in the same place, and it should be something where there’re no distractions, so I would think the countryside. Where I go walk is on this preserved medieval common — to an American, it would look like a large park — and it’s the perfect thing. I just always take the same route. There’s not much on it. [laughs] I see grass and trees. That’s about it.

COWEN: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about soundproofing ?

GRAHAM: Boy, there’s a good question. I’ve learned a few things about soundproofing. Can I only say one thing?

COWEN: One thing is fine. The most important.

GRAHAM: No, no. You said, “What’s the most important?” Can I say some more?

COWEN: Oh, no. You can say more than one.

GRAHAM: Okay. Well, one is that sound comes through holes. It doesn’t come through your walls; it comes through your windows, probably, in most places. If you fix the holes, you fix the noise problem.

The other thing I’ve learned is basically, the solution — it’s either multiple layers, in the case of windows, or simply mass. You make some big, thick door, and make it have hinges that make it sink down. That’s what recording studios have. When the door opens, it rises up a little bit, and when it closes, it goes shoomp right down onto the floor.

So, great big, heavy doors, multiple-paned windows. And , weirdly enough, I’ve managed to soundproof some places so effectively that I’ve noticed this phenomenon you only notice with soundproofing — all kinds of things make annoying noises you never noticed before.

COWEN: That’s right. It’s a war of attrition of sorts.

GRAHAM: Yes, exactly. Soundproofing is worth it, though. Quiet is really good, at least for me.

COWEN: There’s an optimal level of fame. Do you feel you have too much or too little?

GRAHAM: What is the optimal level of fame? I suppose it’s when you can get resources you need or something like that, or if there’s someone you need to talk to, they’ll talk to you. I can now talk to most people I need to talk to. If I want to talk to somebody, I can find somebody who will introduce me, so that must be enough.

COWEN: Are you past the optimal?

GRAHAM: I don’t know. That’s the thing. This sounds very arrogant, but I realized this with Y Combinator. I realized that Y Combinator had become famous long after it had become famous. As far as I was concerned, I was just doing what we’d always been doing. Every six months, we would get all these applications. We’d have to find the needle in the haystack, [laughs] get all these start-ups, help them grow, find investors for them, and then it would start again.

It didn’t seem like YC was any different. It was the same building, the same people. We would get more start-ups. Meanwhile, YC was starting to be considered as this giant gatekeeper for Silicon Valley or something like that.

COWEN: But Jessica knew it was different, right?

GRAHAM: You’re not aware. Famous people don’t know how famous they are, unless they’re experts on it, like movie stars or something like that. They’re always basically taken by surprise. We were especially taken by surprise because the thing is, the companies we funded would grow until they had thousands of employees, but YC itself didn’t grow.

YC’s market-wise — the value of the portfolio grew with these giant companies, but we didn’t see it. We were still just a few people doing the same thing we’d always been doing, so how could we be famous? I discovered that was one of the biggest mistakes I made with YC. I didn’t realize how many people were watching us. I thought we could just keep doing what we were doing, and nothing really mattered.

COWEN: Why was that a mistake, per se? Maybe it was better being oblivious.

GRAHAM: No, because when — basically, anybody outside Silicon Valley who wants to blame Silicon Valley for something, well, who do they blame? They’ve never heard of the people who are actually powerful in Silicon Valley. They only know a handful of people who have consumer brands, me among them. Basically, the world sucks because of tech, and tech sucks because of Paul Graham, [laughs] because they’ve never heard of any of the other people.

I don’t seem to get quite so much of that anymore. I don’t know. I’m glad about that. With YC, definitely, I didn’t know how prominent YC was becoming, and how many people would be out to get us as a result.

COWEN: Very last question. In my view, a life properly lived is learn, learn, learn all the time.

GRAHAM: That’s what Charlie Munger said, right?

COWEN: Yes. Now, what have you recently been learning about, other than soundproofing?

GRAHAM: Well, Tintoretto. [laughs]

COWEN: What are you learning?

GRAHAM: Well, Vasari had a very low opinion of him.

COWEN: Vasari is unreliable on most things, right?

GRAHAM: I don’t know. I don’t know.

COWEN: He way overrated his patrons, the Medici.

GRAHAM: Yes. You have a thing about the Medici, clearly. He said that Tintoretto was too independent-minded, that Tintoretto was a mad genius, and that he would’ve been better if he had constrained his creativity and stayed within the limits of proper art. You know what I mean? A very Florentine sort of idea. I think Tintoretto would have looked down on Vasari as a minor-league artist, but that was interesting. That was interesting to learn that’s how at least some of Tintoretto’s contemporaries viewed him, and Vasari in particular.

COWEN: And a Y Combinator co-founder is not going to buy that argument, is he?

GRAHAM: Which Y Combinator founder?

COWEN: Of Vasari’s, that he was too radical, and too off on his own.

GRAHAM: Oh, I thought you meant Jessica was and agreed with me about Tintoretto.

COWEN: Well, there are two of you. Neither of you would agree with Vasari.

GRAHAM: I don’t know. I’m now going to look. I never thought about this, but I was just looking at some Tintorettos. I was just in Venice, looking at the Scuola Grande di San Marco , where all those Tintorettos are, and they were so dirty. It was hard to tell [laughs] what the paintings actually looked like, [laughs] but I’m going to go look. I’m going to go look and see if they seem freakish.

COWEN: Paul Graham, thank you very much.

GRAHAM: [laughs] Thank you. Boy, that was so many hard questions.

Contributors : About the Site

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Urban Issues
Small Cities
Demographics

Moscow, like other international urban areas , is decentralizing, despite considerable barriers. The expansion will lead to even more decentralization, which is likely to lead to less time "stuck in traffic" and more comfortable lifestyles. Let's hope that Russia's urban development policies, along with its plans to restore population growth, will lead to higher household incomes and much improved economic performance.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “ War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life ”

Note 1: The 23 ward (ku) area of Tokyo is the geography of the former city of Tokyo, which was abolished in the 1940s. There is considerable confusion about the geography of Tokyo. For example, the 23 ward area is a part of the prefecture of Tokyo, which is also called the Tokyo Metropolis, which has led some analysts to think of it as the Tokyo metropolitan area (labor market area). In fact, the Tokyo metropolitan area, variously defined, includes, at a minimum the prefectures of Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama with some municipalities in Gunma, Ibaraki and Tochigi. The metropolitan area contains nearly three times the population of the "Tokyo Metropolis."

Note 2: The expansion area (556 square miles or 1,440 square kilometers) has a current population of 250,000.

Note 3: Includes all residents in suburban districts with at least part of their population in the urban area.

Note 4: Urban area data not yet available.

Photo: St. Basil's Cathedral (all photos by author)

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Evolving Urban Form: Development Profiles of World Urban Areas
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Road in city area.

The roads and ways of the city areas are very clumsy and many accidents are happening due to the short road. But you need to maintain the driving properly otherwise you may face accident. So now the government decided to expand the road which may put the positive effect on automobile sector. I think it is a helpful service for the society people. If you have a BMW car and you have faced any problem then better to repair it at BMW Repair Spring, TX for the best service.

Transit & transportation

Transit and transportation services are quite impressive in most of the urban cities; therefore people were getting better benefits from suitable transportation service. Urban cities like Moscow, Washington, New York and Tokyo; we have found high margin of transportation system that helps to build a better communication network in these cities. I hope through the help of modern transportation system we are able to bring revolutionary change in automobile industries; in this above article we have also found the same concepts to develop transportation system. Mercedes repair in Torrance

Moscow is bursting Noblesse

Moscow is bursting Noblesse at the seams. The core city covers more than 420 square miles (1,090 kilometers), and has a population of approximately 11.5 million people. With 27,300 residents per square mile (10,500 per square kilometer), Moscow is one percent more dense than the bleach anime watch city of New York, though Moscow covers 30 percent more land. The 23 ward area of Tokyo (see Note) is at least a third more dense, though Moscow's land area is at least half again as large as Tokyo. All three core areas rely

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Belgravia Villas is a new and upcoming cluster housing located in the Ang Mo Kio area, nested right in the Ang Mo Kio landed area. It is within a short drive to Little India, Orchard and city area. With expected completion in mid 2016, it comprises of 118 units in total with 100 units of terrace and 18 units of Semi-D. belgravia villas

Russians seeing the light while Western elites are bickering?

What an extremely interesting analysis - well done, Wendell.

It is also extremely interesting that the Russian leadership is reasonably pragmatic about urban form, in contrast to the "planners" of the post-rational West.

An acquaintance recently sent me an article from "The New Yorker", re Moscow's traffic problems.

The article "abstract" is HERE (but access to the full article requires subscription)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gessen

One classic quote worth taking from it, is: "People will endure all manner of humiliation to keep driving".

I do find it odd that the "New Yorker" article author says nothing at all about the rail transit system Moscow had, on which everyone was obliged to travel, under Communism. It can't surely have vaporised into thin air?

Moscow is a classic illustration of just how outmoded rails are, and how important "automobility" is, when the auto supplants rails so rapidly than even when everybody did travel on rails up to a certain date, and the road network dates to that era, when nobody was allowed to own a car; an article written just 2 decades later does not even mention the rail transit system, other than to criticise the mayor for "failing to invest in a transit system".......!!!!!!!!

This is also a give-away of "The New Yorker's" inability to shake off the modern PC ideology on rails vs cars.

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The twenty-first century is the era when populations of cities will exceed rural communities for the first time in human history. The population growth of cities in many countries, including those in transition from planned to market economies, is putting considerable strain on ecological and natural resources. This paper examines four central issues: (a) the challenges and opportunities presented through working in jurisdictions where there are no official or established methods in place to guide regional, ecological and landscape planning and design; (b) the experience of the author’s practice—Gillespies LLP—in addressing these challenges using techniques and methods inspired by McHarg in Design with Nature in the Russian Federation in the first decade of the twenty-first century; (c) the augmentation of methods derived from Design with Nature in reference to innovations in technology since its publication and the contribution that the art of landscape painters can make to landscape analysis and interpretation; and (d) the application of this experience to the international competition and colloquium for the expansion of Moscow. The text concludes with a comment on how the application of this learning and methodological development to landscape and ecological planning and design was judged to be a central tenant of the winning design. Finally, a concluding section reflects on lessons learned and conclusions drawn.

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Cities and Ambition
Cities and Ambition. May 2008. Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money.
Paul Graham
Cities and Ambition Lyrics. May 2008. Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more ...
The Message of Cities
The Message of Cities. By Megan McArdle. May 28, 2008. [ Tim Lee] A good essay by Paul Graham on cities and ambition: Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around ...
Cities and Ambition: Paul Graham
Paul Graham is a 21st century Renaissance man. A brilliant technologist (he has a long list of Web-based inventions,) he also studied painting at RISD and Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. ... A new essay by Graham, Cities and Ambition, plays right into my own proclivity to compare and contrast life in the major cities that I have known in ...
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While Paul Graham's essay focuses on (living in) physical cities, there is a noticeable analog to (some) online businesses. As sovereign creators and Tiny World Builders, we architect non-linear Worlds for our audiences to inhabit, attracting ambitious people into our fold — the weird people we serve; the hell-raisers.
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Arnold Kling. From Another Paul Graham essay: If you start from successful startups, you find they often behaved like nonprofits. And if you start from ideas for nonprofits, you find they'd often make good startups. In Under the Radar, where I argued in favor of bootstrapping a business, I wrote Fundraising is not for businesses....
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In an archived essay, Paul Graham brings up some very insightful things about the characters of ambitious cities that I couldn't write any better myself. In particular, he talks about the subtler messages that cities send and why that is so important for choosing the right one.
Paul Graham on cities and ambition
Paul Graham on cities and ambition (written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: [email protected], or follow me on Twitter. Damn, this might be the best essay that Paul Graham has ever written, and I've liked every essay that he's ever written:
Paul Graham 101
Paul Graham 101. There's probably no one who knows more about startups than Paul Graham. Having helped thousands of startups through Y Combinator, the startup accelerator he co-founded, there's a thing or two to learn from his essays. And Graham's wisdom isn't limited to startups either; his essays, read by millions, touch on education ...
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A collection of essays by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham.
Paul Graham (programmer)
Paul Graham (/ ɡ r æ m /; born 1964) is an English computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, investor, and author.He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), co-founding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.. He is the author of several computer ...
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This is the 'century of the city' when, for the first time in human history, more people will in live in cities than in rural areas. The UN estimates that by 2050 almost three quarters of the world's population will live in cities (Evans et al. 2016, p. 1).The population expansion in the cities of many countries, including those with converging economies, is putting considerable strain ...

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