Paul Graham

“Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part.”

“Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as 'suits'.”

“Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.”

“A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.”

“Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.”

“We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30.”

“Like having a child, running a startup is the sort of experience that's hard to imagine unless you've done it yourself.”

“You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.”

“Startups often have to do dubious things.”

“If you could replace high-school yearbooks, that could be a lot of money. It's so clearly waiting for someone to come along.”

“If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.”

“You know your business model is broken when you're suing your customers.”

“If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.”

“Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired.”

“One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies.”

“I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.”

“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. As far as I can tell it isn't.”

“When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project.”

“Some people just get what they want in the world.”

“What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.”