Essays

Startups don't take off by themselves; founders must manually recruit early users and deliver an unscalably good experience to get the flywheel spinning. The effort that doesn't scale in the beginning is precisely what creates the growth that eventually does.

“The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually.”

The best startup ideas aren't dreamed up on purpose; they're noticed as problems you yourself have, ideally while living at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field. Build something a small number of users want a large amount, rather than something many people want only slightly.

“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.”

Managers live by the calendar in one-hour slots, but makers like programmers and writers need long uninterrupted blocks, so a single meeting can wreck a whole afternoon. Understanding which schedule someone is on explains much of the friction between bosses and the people who actually build things.

“When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster.”

A startup is a company designed to grow fast; being newly founded or working on technology doesn't make a company a startup, but a high growth rate does. Everything—from which ideas to pursue to who to hire—follows from optimizing relentlessly for growth.

“A startup is a company designed to grow fast.”

You need just three things to start a startup: good people, something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Get those right and you can ignore almost everything else; get any of them badly wrong and nothing else will save you.

“You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.”

Most reasons people give themselves for not starting a startup—too young, too inexperienced, not a programmer, no idea—are mostly fears in disguise rather than real obstacles. The real question isn't whether you're qualified, but whether you'd regret never trying.

“What I've learned is that the problem with startups is that you have to do them when you're young, and that's exactly when you're least able to judge whether they're a good idea.”

Great cities each send a subtle, constant message about what matters most—power in New York, money in nothing-quite, status in Boston's learning, newness in Silicon Valley—and that message shapes the ambitious people who live there. Where you live quietly steers what kind of ambition you end up pursuing.

“Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one.”

Hackers are makers more akin to painters and writers than to scientists; programming at its best is a creative act of design, learned by doing and refined by iteration. Treating code as something to be crafted and rewritten, not merely specified, is what produces great software.

“Hackers, likewise, learn to program by writing programs they care about.”

Your mind drifts, in idle moments, to whatever is the top idea in it—and you make your best progress on whatever that happens to be. Guard what occupies that top slot, because money disputes or contentious arguments can hijack it and starve the work that truly matters.

“Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else.”

Every startup that isn't yet profitable should know whether, on current revenue growth and burn, it would reach profitability before the money runs out—'default alive'—or not—'default dead.' Founders too often postpone this question, and asking it early changes which decisions are reckless and which are prudent.

“When 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 left?”

Startups are so counterintuitive that the instincts that serve you well in normal life often mislead you, so it can be safer to act on knowledge of specific situations than on general principles. The most reliable preparation isn't studying startups but simply becoming very good at something and learning how users behave.

“Startups are very counterintuitive. I'm not sure why.”

By writing Viaweb in Lisp, a more powerful language than competitors used, the team could build features faster and stay ahead—an edge Graham calls the 'Blub Paradox,' where programmers can't see the power of languages above the one they know. Choosing a more powerful tool than your rivals can be a quiet but decisive competitive advantage.

“Our hypothesis was that if we wrote our software in Lisp, we'd be able to get features done faster than our competitors, and also to do things in our software that they couldn't do.”

A schlep is a tedious, unpleasant task, and we're often unconsciously blind to startup ideas that involve a lot of them—which is exactly why those ideas stay unclaimed and valuable. Stripe succeeded precisely because its founders were willing to wade through the schleps others avoided.

“No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them.”

Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to cover the founders' modest living expenses, which is different from being a real business but enormously valuable. It buys time and proves the idea, shifting power back to founders by removing the desperate need to raise money.

“Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses.”

Wealth is not the same as money; wealth is the stuff we want, and it can be created, which is why making things people want is the real route to getting rich. A startup is a way to compress a working lifetime into a few years by combining measurement of your output with the leverage to scale it.

“If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is. Wealth is not the same thing as money.”

Having kids made Graham viscerally feel how finite time is, and how much of it gets eaten by 'bullshit'—the pointless obligations and distractions we tolerate by default. The remedy is to consciously prune the bullshit and protect time for the few things and people that genuinely matter.

“Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness?”

Among the most successful founders Graham has known, almost none are mean, and he argues meanness actively works against ambitious success rather than enabling it. The best work comes from being driven by a benevolent idea, and meanness shrinks the kind of thinking that builds great things.

“Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending.”

Graham lays out a hierarchy of disagreement, from name-calling and ad hominem at the bottom up to refuting the central point at the top, as a way to think more clearly about online argument. Climbing toward the higher forms makes people not only more convincing but also, over time, happier and less mean.

“The most powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone's central point.”