Paul Graham

Boom makes things happen.

Established companies will at best adapt to AI. Newly founded startups will be AI-native from the start. This is an interesting example of a company in the middle, which (by great effort) remade itself as an AI-native company.

This kind of transformation is a good example of founder mode. A hired CEO wouldn't have the moral authority (or probably care enough) to ignore existing revenue streams and refocus the company on AI.

Latest auction purchase. Not my favorite style of watch, but how can you not buy a Renis?

According to this NBER analysis, the proposed California wealth tax would actually lose the state money.

Someone asked what was the best way to get hired by a startup. I told him it was to start one and then hire himself.

Pro tip: Hang paintings so that the light on them is coming from the same direction as the light in them. If you can match the color too, that's even better.

Playgrounds before they got nerfed.

14 yo asked how to write good essays. I asked if he meant the kind kids write in school, or actual good essays as written by adults. How strange that I have to ask that. If he asked how to solve a math problem, I wouldn't have to ask if he meant the school way or the real way.

To publish something on a paywalled site is to make it invisible. If AIs can't find it, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist. These two sentences aren't 100% true yet, but they will only get truer.

This is how things will be for the foreseeable future.

Why is speaking of words "doing work" and "doing heavy lifting" so common in AI-generated replies? I assume this phase will pass, but how did it happen at all? Is there one model with this idiosyncrasy that they all use?

Does anyone else stir their tea or coffee before putting the milk in instead of after? (I do because the spoons are near the kettle, but the milk is in the fridge on the other side of the kitchen.)

One pitfall when buying old watches is "redials," or repainted dials. No reputable dealer will sell you one without telling you (maybe with euphemisms like "restored" or "refurbished") but in auctions it's mostly buyer beware. Compare a redial (left) and original (right).

I've been tricked several times by redials, but I won't knowingly buy one. They're different from restorations on paintings because (a) they're irreversible, (b) they cover the entire dial, and (c) they're almost always badly done.

Before it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, the way to do it was to be on the winning side in a military or political dispute.

With the Man, Ron Conway.

If you were trying to create a brand that would sound strange to the Swiss, you couldn't do much better.

Founders are often puzzled when investors reject them for what seem like stupid reasons. There are two possible explanations: (a) the investors actually are stupid, or (b) they just dislike you, and are making up the reason. And that or is not a xor.

My favorite kind of person is the curious nerd with a sparkle in his eye.

Shopping with Jessica. Me: Do you like this tie? Jessica: If you had to dress up so much that you had to wear a tie, I'd do everything in my power to prevent you from wearing that one.

Before a meeting. Me: Can I wear Birkenstocks? Jessica: You met Obama with Birkenstocks.

10x a year for 3 years? I've seen a lot of growth, and that is truly exceptional. It's not unusual for startups to grow 10x in a year, but to keep it up for 3 years is close to unheard of. That's 1000x.

We are truly legit.

Last year's April Fool's joke is this year's reality (except for the name of the problem obviously).

The Tesla Model 3 with FSD is mind-blowing. Jessica and I drove to the gym without touching the controls once. It backed out of our driveway, drove there, and backed into a parking space. It's amazing that you can buy so much future for $40k.

One question founders always ask when we speak at YC is: How much of the standard startup advice still applies in the age of AI? At this point, nearly all of it. I can't promise that will be true in 10 years, but at this moment, starting a startup is much the same as always.

One change is that you don't always need a cofounder to help you do the work, because AI can do a lot of it. But helping you do the work was never the main reason to have a cofounder. You need a cofounder to help bear the stress. AI can't do that for you.

If customers won't buy your stuff, try asking what they would buy. This sounds obvious, but surprisingly few founders do it, and it often yields valuable insights.

Did office hours yesterday with a very smart but nerdy founder. When I suggested he might want a more outgoing cofounder to do sales, he said he didn't, because most of his sales would be to agents. I had to admit he could be right.

Did office hours yesterday with a very smart but nerdy founder. When I suggested he might want a more outgoing cofounder to do sales, he said didn't, because most of his sales would be to agents. I had to agree he could be right.

This skeletonized Audemars Piguet 14232 is a great way to understand how movements work. The big circle at 1:00 is the muscle: the barrel, which contains the mainspring. The other, at 5:30, is the brain: the balance wheel, which oscillates rapidly to keep time.

Since this movement is a self-winding one, there's a rotor on the other side. It's the gold semi-circle occupying the bottom half of the movement. This rotates as you move your arm, keeping the watch wound. You want a rotor to be dense, so this one is 21k gold.

The Patek Philippe reference 1578, 1962.

Talked to someone recently who knows a lot about defense tech, and he made an interesting point: the test of most military hardware right now is whether the Ukrainians want it. They have a hot war going against a determined opponent, and they know what works.

"You've made it abundantly clear that you care more about work than about me, or this family." — a friend's 6 yo daughter as she left on a work trip

Amazon banning agents is the first opportunity I've seen since Amazon was founded for a startup to create an Amazon competitor. People will want agents to buy stuff for them. It will be one of the main use cases. And they won't want to use some Amazon-supplied agent to do it.

"Your restrictions on usage are my opportunity."

Any business that bans agents represents an opportunity for a startup to create a competitor. If they need to ban agents, it must mean people want to use them, or there would be no point. And that in turn means there's demand for a competitor that allows them.

"I feel kind of gross. I ate the same amount as you." — Jessica after going to Gott's

When you talk to successful founders, they always wish they'd hired fewer top managers from outside. I don't think I've ever met a founder who wished he or she had promoted fewer people from within.

The problem is not just that these hired managers are from outside. They're also a different kind of person. As one founder put it, "their loyalty is to their career, not to the company."

Talking to Amjad yesterday, I realized Replit is more important than I'd previously thought. It's the way AI pervades organizations. Organizations can become somewhat aligned with AI by using AI-powered apps, but the deepest change takes the form of code.

@wbhub I take this back. Although the 27-460 is a great movement, the 12-600 seems to have been very good too.

The IWC cal 853, one of the great automatic movements of the golden age.

This is the 853 inside this watch:

It's great to have competitors who are motivated by money. If they're any good, they eventually get it, and then they stop working. And if they aren't good, they aren't good.

Halloween 2014: A very serious 2 yo wants the full bat experience.

One very important thing that even the smartest people seem to have to learn from experience is taste in problems. There are juicy problems that tend to lead to interesting discoveries, and nasty problems that tend not to.

If I had to say in one word what distinguishes the juicy ones, the word might be unity. Nasty problems tend to be collections of random, often extrinsic constraints. Juicy problems have one main thing you're trying to solve

One very important thing that even the smartest people seem to have to learn from experience is taste in problems. There are juicy problems that tend to lead to interesting discoveries, and nasty problem that tend not to.

"You said it would consume all my time and attention, but it really does consume all your time and attention." — friend who started a startup

"You said it would consume all my time and attention, but it really does consume all your time and attention." — friend who started a startup

"There's no such thing as a complete set of tools." — Trevor Blackwell

"You said it would consume all my time and attention, but it really does consume all your time an attention." — friend who started a startup

I've been talking to a YC founder who's 15 years in and still doing big new things. One of the biggest popular misconceptions about startups is that founders have a brilliant idea, then implement it. In fact more often than not the biggest idea comes later.

The mistaken belief that everything depends on the initial idea hoses you in multiple ways. It makes you give up if the initial idea doesn't work. But it also puts too much weight on it: if everything depends on the initial idea, it has to be huge.

A company name that appeals to corporate buyers may not appeal so much to their customers.

@ahistoryinart You can tell this was painted in a cold room.

Don't own the .com? The good news is, there's no such thing. "The .com" is just the only .com you've been able to think of so far.

Apparently some people found this hard to understand. It's intended for startup founders who call their company <name> but don't own <name>.com. I'm saying they should just think of another name instead of e.g. resorting to expedients like try<name>.ai.

In England, students choose just a few subjects (usually 3) to study in the last 2 years of high school, so gender differences in their interests become more visible than in the US.

A friend of mine acknowledges that something is meant to be funny by laughing with 5 has: hahahahaha. Then if he actually found it funny he shifts to a higher pitch on the 6th ha and emits several more verses of has.

I recently met someone who'd printed out all my essays. I'd never seen this before and I was surprised how big they were, like two encyclopedia volumes (for anyone who even knows what an encyclopedia volume is).

"Do not bet against the airplane. The skeptics who say AI can't conjecture, can't theorize, and can't explain are describing last spring's models. Within months, they will be describing nobody. The evidence is already on the table, and those with eyes can see it."

There were a lot of things that only worked because there's a limit to the rate at which humans can operate. We're about to find out what all of them are, as they break.

Average accuracy of vintage watches I own, by brand, in seconds per day, dial up. Zenith 1.9 Omega 2.7 Longines 2.8 Patek Philippe 3.7 Eterna 4.0 Audemars Piguet 5.2 IWC 6.1 Vacheron Constantin 8.9

The sample sizes are small, and to measure accuracy properly you should really test in 5 positions. But Zenith, Omega, and Longines were the three brands that dominated golden age observatory trials. If nothing else, this shows they still regulate well today.

I had ChatGPT rank watches I own by accuracy in sec/day, dial up. Zenith 1.9 Omega 2.7 Longines 2.8 Patek Philippe 3.7 Eterna 4.0 Audemars Piguet 5.2 IWC 6.1 Vacheron Constantin 8.9

The sample sizes are small, and to measure accuracy properly you should really test in 5 positions. But Zenith, Omega, and Longines were the three brands that dominated golden age observatory trials. If nothing else, this shows they still regulate well today.

This explains why till now I'd never explicitly considered the question of what was the first man-made thing to make it into space. We don't talk about that milestone.

AI startups grow really fast. That's why valuations have gotten so high. Not just because AI is the cool new thing, but because so many AI startups have genuinely amazing numbers.

The sentinel hypothesis proposes that teenagers staying up late has evolutionary advantages, because there's always someone awake to notice if your tribe of hunter-gatherers is attacked. You can probably guess who told me about this.

AIs can now ship containers.

Jessica bought me a fabulous watch from my favorite vintage watch shop (Somlo) and conspired with them to have it in the window when I walked by. Of course it was the first one I noticed. But instead of a description, the label said "Happy early birthday Paul." I still didn't get that it was for me, because one of the guys who works there is called Paul. I turned to Jessica and said that he must have a birthday coming up too, but why would they put his watch in the window? Then I noticed she was grinning like the Cheshire cat.

It can be surprisingly powerful not to stream or even record a talk. It might seem that if a talk is happening anyway, there's no cost to streaming it as well. But I think there often is some cost.

It's strange how much easier it gets not to make certain mistakes after making them just once. You'd think a mistake that was easy to avoid making twice wouldn't be too too difficult to avoid making even once, but that's not usually how it works.

The good news is, if some domain has a finite number of possible mistakes and you never make mistakes twice, you have a chance of approaching perfection eventually. As Bohr said, "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field."

The excellent Omega cal 266. You could make a reasonable case that the Omega 30T2 family were the quintessential golden age hand-wound movements. And because they're not rare they're comparatively cheap today. You can get good examples for under $1000.

Someone asked if it's important to live with your cofounder(s). It can help, especially early on. But it's not so critical that you should force yourselves to do it if you don't all enjoy it.

A surprising proportion of the most successful founding teams lived together at some point. But this isn't all proof that living together wins. Some of what it's showing is simply that the founders liked one another, and liking one another definitely wins.

It's surprisingly revealing to ask: if someone's name were a unit of something, what would it be a unit of?

We talked about this over breakfast. We decided Trevor's would be (possibly excessive) generality in an engineering solution, Jessica's would be either curiosity about someone's character or degree of incapacitation when laughing, and mine would be amount of change in an idea.

Sure, there are some kinds of thinking that don't require writing. People could think before writing was invented. But writing is an extraordinarily valuable tool in the hardest kinds of thinking.

I just did office hours with a startup that needed (among other things) a new name. I asked what adjective scientists use to describe the situation their technology is designed to induce. The .com was untaken. If only it was always like this.

Future generations won't believe we let this happen.

One of the most interesting things about startups is that there are exceptions to practically every rule. E.g. it's bad to be a solution in search of a problem. Except .5% of the time it's good. The ultimate test of an investor is to see these exceptions.

When I notice such edge cases, I don't just agree that it's ok for the founders to go against the conventional wisdom. I urge them to, because I know I need to compensate for all the pressure they're going to get in the opposite direction from their other investors.

There is always a .com you can get for $5k that's better the tryblurgh.‌ai you're currently using. The reason you don't see it is (a) lack of imagination and (b) because you're attached to Blurgh, which you shouldn't be, because it's not that great anyway.

One of the most interesting things about startups is that there are exceptions to practically every rule. E.g. it's bad to be a solution in search of a problem. Except .5% of the time it's ideal. The ultimate test of an investor is to see these exceptions.

There is always a .com you can get for $5k that's better the t.co/sAEGzoHNNO you're currently using. The reason you don't see it is (a) lack of imagination and (b) because you're attached to Blurgh, which you shouldn't be, because it's not that great anyway.

Jessica says all my old watches look the same to her. A preposterous idea. But I admit there is a slight resemblance between the two I just got at auction.