14 Curated Essays From Y Combinator's Paul Graham
14 Curated Essays From Y Combinator's Paul Graham
Hey y'all 👋
Paul Graham cofounded Y Combinator and has written over 200 essays (mostly) about startups.
He's a legend in Silicon Valley (so much so that Elon Musk called him to personally apologize after he was "mistakenly" banned from Twitter recently).
As I gear up for a fresh year of building in 2023 (big things planned for my newsletter 👀), I reread a bunch of my favorite essays of his.
I'm sharing them below and also including my thoughts on each one 👇
Read time: 5 minutes
⚡️ 14 Essays From Y Combinator's Paul Graham
Do Things That Don't Scale | Full Essay
Startups don't get started on their own, and many founders make the mistake of investing in a scalable growth channel before even knowing if they're making something people actually want.
Airbnb's founders went door to door to recruit and learn from prospective hosts. By having these candid conversations, they better understood the type of people who would be interested in hosting strangers at their home, vs those who wouldn't — and what they wanted out of a platform like Airbnb.
The best way to reach scale is to first do things that don't scale.
Startup = Growth | Full Essay
These days people refer to any new company as a startup, but the fact is that a startup is a specific kind of company — one that's designed specifically to grow fast above all else.
This is my favorite essay on this list because it teaches founders how to use growth as a compass for decision making.
How To Get Startup Ideas | Full Essay
If you find yourself looking for a new idea, stop. Instead, look for problems. Only a solution to a problem will make people get excited and take action.
Oftentimes, you can find relevant problems in your own life that others have as well. According to PG, these are the best problems for founders to solve because they're typically more passionate about solving them.
18 Mistakes That Kill Startups | Full Essay
If you don't make something people want, your startup will die. The hardest part is that there's no guaranteed formula for startup success (though Keith Rabois would disagree).
What's easier to do as a founder is learn from the mistakes other founders have made. PG has seen thousands of founders fail and compiled a list of the most common mistakes he sees, but still says this is "a list of 18 things that cause startups not to make something users want" and that "nearly all failure funnels through that."
Billionaires Build | Full Essay
Interestingly, this doubles as an outline of how to ace your interview for Y Combinator's accelerator program.
PG draws from his experience likely meeting more billionaires in the early stages of their wealth and company creation that just about anyone else, to understand what makes them different than everyone else.
What Startups Are Really Like | Full Essay
PG asked some founders who'd joined Y Combinator "what surprised you about starting a startup?"
He received over 100 responses and categorized them into 19 buckets in this essay. Even though this essay is from 2009, I've heard many similar surprises from founders I've met in the last few years.
How To Convince Investors | Full Essay
Inexperienced founders try to convince investors. PG argues they should, instead, let their startup do the work for them.
It brings up a good point about how to raise — the founders I know who've had the easiest time fundraising weren't even actively fundraising when they received investor interest. Instead, they were focused on building relationships with investors from the earliest points of their startup.
If you go to investors for advice rather than money, but casually share positive signals and updates with them while you're talking, they'll be more likely to proactively be interested.
How To Make Wealth | Full Essay
Building generational wealth for yourself and your family is incredibly hard in every country in the world.
After seeing so many startups go through Y Combinator, PG argues that the highest likelihood way to achieve it is by taking on a hard problem with a small team.
The Hardest Lessons For Startups To Learn | Full Essay
The most successful startups tend to "learn some lessons quicker than others."
My favorite one here is "fear the right things" — PG says that most things typically considered disasters (like your cofounder leaving the company) and even intense competition won't actually kill your startup. (Side note: it's interesting to compare this advice to how Peter Thiel says to avoid competition whenever possible)
What does PG say you should fear instead? Other startups that you're not aware of yet.
How To Start A Startup | Full Essay
To get off the ground, a startup needs three things:
Good people on the team
To make something that people want
To spend as little money as possible
The exciting part about this is that all three of these things are doable — there's no magically difficult step that requires inherent brilliance to solve that's required for a startup to be successful.
Why Not To Start A Startup | Full Essay
Some reasons to not start a startup are real, but others aren't. PG looks at 16 commonly cited reasons and dissects each one.
Spoiler alert: Most aren't real.
How To Think For Yourself | Full Essay
The paradox of startup ideas is that if everyone you know is telling you that your startup idea is good, it probably isn't.
Markets big enough for a new venture-backed startup get filled incredibly quickly once they're noticed, so if something is commonly understood by many people then it's likely that either:
The market doesn't actually exist or...
Solving the problem isn't currently feasible (and has been tried)
The best kind of startup idea is one that sounds like a bad idea to other people, but you know isn't.
Relentlessly Resourceful | Full Essay
Y Combinator's motto is "make something people want" and in this essay PG claims that is the destination, but "be relentlessly resourceful" is the path that takes you there.
Relentlessly resourceful needs to be the default mode of operation for founders.
The Bus Ticket Theory Of Genius | Full Essay
Most people think great work comes out of one of two things:
Inherent talent
Determination
But PG makes the case that, regardless of those other two things, all forms of genius require a baseline obsessive interest in the problem or topic for no well-defined reason
I'm super excited for what I have planned for my newsletter in 2023 and can't wait to share it with you!
In the meantime, if you enjoyed this week's post, share your thoughts on Twitter and tag me