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April 2007 There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there's a second much more common type of judgement where it isn't. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. We'd probably be happier if we realized which are and which aren't. The f...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking ho...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). October 2009 _(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.)_ I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I ...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). April 2010 The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you? There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of you...
February 2009 A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask "How could we make something like that happen here?" The [organic](siliconvalley.html) way to do it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live. That's how Silicon Valley happened. But could you shortcut the process ...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). June 2006 _(This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.)_ A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing ...
September 2009 I bet you the current issue of _Cosmopolitan_ has an article whose title begins with a number. "7 Things He Won't Tell You about Sex," or something like that. Some popular magazines feature articles of this type on the cover of every issue. That can't be happening by accident. Editors must know they...
December 2008 For nearly all of history the success of a society was proportionate to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations. Those who bet on economies of scale generally won, which meant the largest organizations were the most successful ones. Things have already changed so much that th...
There is a kind of mania for object-oriented programming at the moment, but some of the [smartest programmers](reesoo.html) I know are some of the least excited about it. My own feeling is that object-oriented programming is a useful technique in some cases, but it isn't something that has to pervade every program...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). January 2012 A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they und...
"...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day." � Charles Dickens July 2009 One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more. There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the ...
November 2015 A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on it had been a "one-man show." It's sadly common to read that sort of thing. But the problem with that description is not just that it's unfair. It's also misleading. Much of what's most novel about YC is due to Jessica Livingston. If y...
January 2004 Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? _Did we actually dress like that?_ We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it. ...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). August 2013 The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of course a recipe for exponential growth. When one investor wants to invest in you, that makes other...
November 2019 If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy. To discover new things, you have to work on ideas that are good but non- obvious; if an idea is obviously good, other people are probably already working on it. One common way for a good idea to...
December 2005 The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad? Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing....
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). October 2006 _(This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.)_ Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your o...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). January 2012 There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call _schlep blindness_. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passe...
March 2021 The secret curse of the nonprofit world is restricted donations. If you haven't been involved with nonprofits, you may never have heard this phrase before. But if you have been, it probably made you wince. Restricted donations mean donations where the donor limits what can be done with the money. T...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). April 2008 Umair Haque [wrote](http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/04/i_agree_and_i.html) recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the worl...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). March 2005 _(This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.)_ You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, a...
November 2004 A lot of people are writing now about why Kerry lost. Here I want to examine a more specific question: why were the exit polls so wrong? In Ohio, which Kerry ultimately lost 49-51, exit polls gave him a 52-48 victory. And this wasn't just random error. In every swing state they overestimated the...
March 2006 _(This essay is derived from a talk at Google.)_ A few weeks ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted four [patents](http://paulgraham.infogami.com/blog/morepatents). This was all the more surprising because I'd only applied for three. The patents aren't mine, of course. They were assigned...
November 2019 Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic. To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some group of people, and I'm going to choose b...
September 2022 I recently told applicants to Y Combinator that the best advice I could give for getting in, per word, was > Explain what you've learned from users. That tests a lot of things: whether you're paying attention to users, how well you understand them, and even how much they need what you're making. ...
February 2022 Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won'...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). July 2010 I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a ...
November 2014 It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few. Meanness isn't rare. In fact, one of the things the internet has shown us is how mean people can be. A few decades ago, only famous people and professional writers got to publis...
Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes. The surprising thing is how many, and how well, languages can be described this way. **Algol:** Assembly language is too low-level. **Pascal:** Algol doesn't have enough data types...
January 2020 _(I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often surprised by the attention they get as their companies grow, but it applies equally to anyone who becomes famous.)_ If you become sufficiently famous, you'll acquire some fans who like you too much. These people are sometimes calle...
March 2012 As a child I read a book of stories about a famous judge in eighteenth century Japan called Ooka Tadasuke. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop. A poor student who could afford only rice was eating his rice while enjoying the delicious cooking smells coming from the food s...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). March 2007 _(This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.)_ We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the ...
After a link to [Beating the Averages](avg.html) was posted on slashdot, some readers wanted to hear in more detail about the specific technical advantages we got from using Lisp in Viaweb. For those who are interested, here are some excerpts from a talk I gave in April 2001 at BBN Labs in Cambridge, MA.
January 2003 _(This article was given as a talk at the 2003 Spam Conference. It describes the work I've done to improve the performance of the algorithm described in[A Plan for Spam](spam.html), and what I plan to do in the future.)_ The first discovery I'd like to present here is an algorithm for lazy evalu...
August 2003 We may be able to improve the accuracy of Bayesian spam filters by having them follow links to see what's waiting at the other end. Richard Jowsey of [death2spam](http://death2spam.com) now does this in borderline cases, and reports that it works well. Why only do it in borderline cases? And why o...
October 2022 If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're true by definition. Ditto for the truths of physics; the mass of a carbon atom would be the same on their planet. But I think we'd sha...
November 2022 In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer. That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just because ...
August 2004 In a recent [talk](gh.html) I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project. I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work ...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). March 2005 _(Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.)_ Recently I've had several emails from computer science undergrads asking what to do in college. I might not be ...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). October 2012 One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends before most other people. And one of the most conspicuous trends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups. O...
July 2010 When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years s...
May 2008 Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. There may also be a benefit to us. We were all lied to as kids, and some of the lies we were told still affect us. So by studying the ways adults lie to kids, we may be abl...
April 2009 [Om Malik](http://gigaom.com/2009/04/03/google-may-buy-twitter-or-not-but-why- is-twitter-so-hot/) is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal. The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more preci...
April 2009 Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined. The first is that startups may represent a [new economic phase](highres.html), on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. I'm not sure of this, but there seems a decent chance it's true. People are dramaticall...
November 2016 If you're a California voter, there is an important proposition on your ballot this year: Proposition 62, which bans the death penalty. When I was younger I used to think the debate about the death penalty was about when it's ok to take a human life. Is it ok to kill a killer? But that is n...
March 2009 About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It's clear now that even by using the word "convergence" we were giving TV too much credit. This won't be convergen...
January 2005 _(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)_ When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you ...
July 2008 At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a [talk](http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at- startup-school-08) in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way. Instead of hoping to get rich by building a valuable company and...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). September 2012 A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or ha...
May 2021 Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinary social situations they are — as quiet and diffident as the star quarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physics symposium. And for the same reason: they are fish out of water. But the apparent diffidence of nerds is an ...
December 2014 Many startups go through a point a few months before they die where although they have a significant amount of money in the bank, they're also losing a lot each month, and revenue growth is either nonexistent or mediocre. The company has, say, 6 months of runway. Or to put it more brutally, 6 months ...
June 2013 _(This talk was written for an audience of investors.)_ Y Combinator has now funded 564 startups including the current batch, which has 53. The total valuation of the 287 that have valuations (either by raising an equity round, getting acquired, or dying) is about $11.7 billion, and the 511 prior t...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). September 2009 Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest. Predic...
August 2007 A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem s...
July 2009 The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them. Someone riding a Segway looks like a dork. My friend Trevor Blackwell built [his own Segway](http://tlb.org/#scooter), which we called the Se...
April 2001 This essay developed out of conversations I've had with several other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious. It's not a critique of Java! It is a case study of hacker's radar. Over time, hackers develop a nose for good (and bad) technology. I thought it might be interesting to try and write...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). August 2013 When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make ...
November 2020 There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to ...
February 2009 Hacker News was two years old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've learned s...
April 2021 Every year since 1982, _Forbes_ magazine has published a list of the richest Americans. If we compare the 100 richest people in 1982 to the 100 richest in 2020, we notice some big differences. In 1982 the most common source of wealth was inheritance. Of the 100 richest people, 60 inherited from an ...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it av...
October 2023 One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear. Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. "You get out," I heard a thousand times, "what you put in." They meant well,...
May 2003 _(This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.)_ When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in pai...
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html). March 2012 One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing...
February 2009 I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on ...
May 2006 _(This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.)_ Startups happen in clusters. There are a lot of them in Silicon Valley and Boston, and few in Chicago or Miami. A country that wants startups will probably also have to reproduce whatever makes these clusters form. I've claimed that the [recipe...
August 2005 _(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)_ Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of...
January 2015 No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it. And yet he's a super nice guy. In fact, nice is not the word. Ronco is good. I know of zero instances in which he has behaved ba...
December 2008 _(I originally wrote this at the request of a company producing a report about entrepreneurship. Unfortunately after reading it they decided it was too controversial to include.)_ VC funding will probably dry up somewhat during the present recession, like it usually does in bad times. But this ...
July 2006I've discovered a handy test for figuring 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, ...
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2008, rev. June 2008Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may ...
April 2004To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer wants to or not...
May 2021Noora Health, a nonprofit I've supported for years, just launched a new NFT. It has a dramatic name, Save Thousands of Lives, because that's what the proceeds will do.Noora has been saving lives for 7 years. They run programs in hospitals in South Asia to teach new mothers how to take care of their babies once...
February 2020What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful.To start with, that means it should be correct. But it's not enough merely to be correct. It's easy to make a ...
December 2014If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing confidence in our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience a belief survived, the less likely it would be false. Most people implicitly believe something like this about their opinions. And they're justified in doing so with opinions...
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. November 2005Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably righ...
April 2012A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. Her list seems plausible. I could see myself — can see myself — making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes.If you had to compress them into a single piece of advice, it might be: don't be a cog. The 5 regrets paint a po...
December 2014I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What u...
September 2007In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college. I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the less honorable was to shock people. College was regarded as job training where I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively impractical thing to do. Sort o...
April 2005"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002. Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? ...
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2001, rev. April 2003(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.) In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called Viaweb. Our plan was to write software that would let end users build...
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2014(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.)One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have...
April 2006(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 Startup School.)The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.We've now invested in enough companies that I've learned a...
May 2001 (I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp — both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core i...
Aaron Swartz created a scraped feed of the essays page.
October 2015This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing anything about the applicant pool. Which is exciting because among other things it means third parties can use this technique to detect bias whether those doing the selecti...
November 2005In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. They're already stuck with a seller's market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the Bubble and still haven't invested. This by itself is not the end of the world. In fact, it's just a mor...
May 2021There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly. If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I'd be very reluctant to say "That will never work."Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the history of scie...
May 2003If Lisp is so great, why don't more people use it? I was asked this question by a student in the audience at a talk I gave recently. Not for the first time, either.In languages, as in so many things, there's not much correlation between popularity and quality. Why does John Grisham (King of Tort...
January 2003(This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting of NEPLS.)Visitors to this country are often surprised to find that Americans like to begin a conversation by asking "what do you do?" I've never liked this question. I've rarely had a neat answer to it. But I think I have finally solve...
December 2001 (rev. May 2002) (This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds.)When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most important of which was Fortran.Lisp embodied nine ne...
August 2021When people say that in their experience all programming languages are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about languages but about the kind of programming they've done.99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions. All popular languages are equally good at thi...
January 2015Corporate Development, aka corp dev, is the group within companies that buys other companies. If you're talking to someone from corp dev, that's why, whether you realize it yet or not.It's usually a mistake to talk to corp dev unless (a) you want to sell your company right now and (b) you're sufficiently li...
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2010 (I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.)1. DeterminationThis has turned out to be the most important quality in ...
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2011If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude. Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide.I wondered about this for years. I could see the ave...
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. January 2006To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.The very idea is foreign to what mo...
October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. 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 lef...
September 2017The most valuable insights are both general and surprising. F = ma for example. But general and surprising is a hard combination to achieve. That territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable.Ordinarily, the best that people can do is one without the other: either s...
April 2009I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions, I'm going to risk making one. The single biggest thing the government could do to increase the number of startups in this country is a policy that would cost nothing: establish a new class of visa for star...
January 2012A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site. I thought it might be interesting to look at one day.The first thing one notices is is how tiny the pages are. Screens were a lot smaller in 1998. If I remember correctly, our frontpage used to just fi...