Paul Graham's essays provide valuable lessons for founders. Here are some key takeaways:
Persistence is crucial in the startup journey. Expect that it will take a long time and be prepared to face challenges along the way .
Keep your company's operations as inexpensive as possible. The cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill .
Stay off the radar of the startup scene and focus on making something amazing with a small team. Keeping the company small can lead to lower costs and less managerial burden .
Be authentic and true to yourself. Build a business that aligns with your true interests and values .
Prepare for the demoralizing nature of running a startup. Many startups fail not because they lack potential, but because they become demoralized .
Surround yourself with excellent colleagues. Working with the best people can make a significant difference in doing great work .
Focus on your audience and avoid intermediaries that come between you and your customers. Direct communication with your audience can be liberating and lead to better understanding and success .
Rely on your intense conviction and intellectual honesty. Be earnest in your work and focus on what matters .
Prioritize what is truly important and don't waste time on distractions. Seek out individuals who increase your energy and avoid negative influences .
Embrace the advantages of youth, such as energy and time, as well as the advantages of age, such as knowledge and efficiency .
Start with the simplest thing that could work and iterate over time. Embrace the idea of evolving and refining your work .
Avoid letting your startup die by staying motivated and persevering. Many startups fail not because of external factors but because they become demoralized .
Luck can play a role, but creating opportunities and being prepared are key to capitalizing on luck .
Embrace the pain and challenges of creating a company. Excellence often requires the capacity to take pain .
Maintain your morale and protect it. Build a supportive network and avoid negative influences .
Strive for greatness and believe in your own opinion and work. Don't be deterred by critics; the loudest boos often come from the cheapest seats .
Be willing to redo work and cut things that don't fit. Concentrate on what truly matters and strive for quality .
Work on your own authentic path and focus on what genuinely interests you. Avoid getting distracted by external influences .
Seek out companionship among individuals of superior intellect and character. Surround yourself with the best colleagues to elevate your work .
These are just a few of the lessons from Paul Graham's essays. I encourage you to explore his writings for a more comprehensive understanding of his insights and advice.
(someone): Paul says, one reason founders are surprised is that because they work fast, they expect everyone else to. And then another reason they're surprised by how long everything takes is because a lot of them are overconfident. I think the reason most founders are surprised by how long it takes is that they're overconfident. They think they're going to be an instant success like YouTube or Facebook. You tell them only one out of 100 successful startups has a trajectory like that, and they think, yep, we're going to be that one. And so then Paul says, maybe they'll listen to one of the more successful founders. This is what one of the more successful founders told Paul. The top thing I didn't understand before going into it is that persistence is the name of the game. It's going to be a really long journey. Number seven is lots of little things. I really like what this founder says here. Grind over glamour. Paul says, we often emphasize how rarely startups win simply because they hit on some magic idea. I think founders have now gotten that into their heads. But a lot we're surprised to find this also applies within the startup. You have to do a lot of different little things. This is an email from a founder. It is much more of a grind than glamorous. You will more likely find me tracking down a bug rather than having brilliant flashes of some strategic insight. Another email from a founder. I learned never to bet on any one feature or deal or anything to bring you success. It's never just a single thing.
(someone): I've been telling founders for the surest route to success is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world. The immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money, which is exactly what Don Valentine just told us. So the cheaper your company, this is the punchline here, so the cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill. So let's go back to this essay from the book that I'm holding in my hand. The less you spend, the easier it is to make more than you spend. As for building something users love, here's some general tips. Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. The standard to compare your software to, and your product, right? The standard to compare your product to is what it could be, not what your current competitors happen to have. Use your software yourself all the time. Use your product yourself all the time. Okay, so I want to jump to Paul's essay, Mind the Gap. When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There's a huge gap between Leonardo da Vinci and second-rate contemporaries. A top-ranked professional chess player could play 10,000 games against an ordinary club player without losing once. Like chess, or painting, or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason, we treat this skill differently. You get paid by doing or making something people want, and those who make more money are often simply better at doing what people want. Steve Jobs saved a company that was in terminal decline.
(someone): I would raise maybe $500,000. I'd keep the company small for the first year. I would work closely with users to make something amazing, and otherwise I would stay off of Silicon Valley's radar. In other words, I'd be the opposite of a scene-ster. Ideally, I would get to profitability on that initial 500K. Later, I could raise more if I felt like it. Or not, but it would be on my terms. At every point, this is I think the part I actually found most interesting personally, at every point in the company's growth, I'd keep the company as small as I could. I'd always want people to be surprised by how few employees we had. Fewer employees equal lower costs and less need to turn into a manager. And so that popped to mind when you have this email from the founder saying, it would have been much better if we had operated under the assumption that we would never get any additional outside capital. And so then Paul adds on to that, my advice is generally pessimistic. Assume you won't get money. And if someone does offer you any, assume you'll never get any more of it. And then he talks about, hey, founders don't take this advice. They don't listen to me. Why do founders ignore me? Mostly because they're optimistic by nature. The mistake is to be optimistic about things you can't control. That is excellent. So that's why his whole point is like, you need to be in charge of your own destiny.
(someone): let go of is, I think a key to doing truly great work is building a business that's authentic to you, to your true self. And what I realized is like, oh, yes, they have more experience, but they know themselves better. The process of self-discovery of like really figuring out, okay, who am I truly? Not am I imitating what's around me? Like, who am I truly? What are my true interests? And like, what do I actually want to do with my life? That process is usually take many, many decades. So it's like, yeah, they had a lot more experience and practice as an entrepreneur, but they also know themselves way better multiple decades into the career than when they started. And I think there's a relationship between those two things. Back to this essay. Another permissible lie is to exaggerate the importance of what you're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you discover something new, it may turn out not to have been a lie at all. That is a fascinating idea, that it might be a good idea to lie to yourself. Exaggerate the importance of what you're working on, at least in your own mind. If that helps you discover something new, it may turn out to not have been a lie at all. And so the footnote on that idea is he says, this is an idea I learned from this book called A Mathematician's Apology, and he says, I recommend to anyone ambitious to do great work in any field. And he follows that interesting idea up with another one. This is Paul's theory on per-project procrastination.
(someone): If so many startups get demoralized and fail when merely by hanging on they could get rich, you have to assume that running a startup can be demoralizing. That is certainly true. I've been there and that is why I've never done another startup. And then he goes into the point, like, knowing that this is going to be painful and going to be difficult is helpful. Like, it should not be surprising to you. The way you and I have talked about this in the past over and over again is that excellence is the capacity to take pain. That is a fantastic quote from the founder of Four Seasons. If you know it's going to feel terrible sometimes, then when it feels terrible, you won't think, ouch, this feels terrible. I give up. It feels that way for everyone. Another feeling that will seem alarming but is in fact normal in a startup is the feeling that what you're doing isn't working. The reason you can expect to feel this way is what you do probably will not work. Startups almost never get it right the first time. Much more commonly you launch something and no one cares. Don't assume when this happens that you failed. That is normal for startups. But don't sit around and do nothing. Iterate. So then he goes into some ideas on how to avoid death, how to avoid your company dying. Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with, but we're going to keep working on a startup, you are in big trouble.
(someone): Never let setbacks panic you into backtracking more than you need to. It is not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle any more than it's a bad sign to be out of breath while running. And so then he turns the essay and ties this all back into morale. An audience is a critical component of morale. And so this will become obvious, I think, as you go through this, but he's talking about, like, the people using whatever it is that you're making, right? What is a, who is, you're making great work. It's not like you're the only person, it can't be great if you're the only person that sees it. So somebody is using the tool or listening to what you're doing or whatever, reading it, whatever it is. If you're just starting out, a small but dedicated audience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of people genuinely love what you're doing, that is enough. Avoid letting intermediaries come between you and your audience. That point is actually very important. Avoid letting intermediaries come between you and your audience. When I first thought about that, I thought about Taylor Swift, like on Tumblr, right? Talking directly to her fans, to the people listening to her music. There's nobody in between her and her audience. also can be applied in like the more like traditional like business product sense, where do you study the career of Edwin land, he starts trying to make, he's always making innovations, because he, you know, is creating new technology, new patents, new science.
(someone): Because again, you're not, he said, this essay is not for you if you're not ambitious. If you're just trying to like skate through life, there's no point in reading it. But he's assuming, okay, you're following, you're excessively interested, you're willing to—you want to do great work, which then means you'll do enough work to get to the frontier of knowledge, and then once you get there, you'll notice the gaps, and you'll be like, oh wait, other people are taking this for granted. If the answer seems strange to you, so much the better. Great work often has a tincture of strangeness. and then he has advice on what to do next. Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people are not interested in them. In fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good of a bet as you will find. And in this next paragraph, this last sentence in this next paragraph, which I'll get to in one second, is exactly why Paul Graham's essays, all of them, are worth reading and rereading, and you've seen this through my own actions. Go back to, what, 275, 276, 277. It's been like three weeks reading and rereading all of his essays, and I've read them a bunch for years. And you do this because he's able to compare ideas. And in this case, he's focused on great work in different fields, entrepreneurship, arts, mathematics, whatever it is. So he says four steps.
(someone): In fact, it's not merely better, but necessary. Judging from history, the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not. Whoa, we got to read that again. The degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one's colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not. That's why you see so many of history's great founders. They put, they repeat over and over again, and the importance of recruiting and finding a way to attract the very best people, whether it's partners, employees, it doesn't matter. Like they're all repeat this over and over again. And then Paul has this great way to tell if you've done this or not. How do you know when you have sufficiently good colleagues? In my experience, when you do, you know, which means if you're unsure, you probably don't. And then the essay takes a fascinating turn because he talks about maintaining your own inner monologue and your own morale. Husband your morale. It is the basis of everything when you're working on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it. I've done multiple episodes and read multiple books about Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he says this over and over again. It's very dangerous when you start doubting yourself. he would very deliberately get away physically from people that would try to like either tell him, Oh, Arnold, don't do that. It's impossible. Like you can't like, how can you be an actor?
(someone): That is excellent. So that's why his whole point is like, you need to be in charge of your own destiny. And then once you're in there, you have a lot more options, and you get to pick and choose what's best for you and your company. Number 14, investors are clueless. A lot of founders mentioned how surprised they were by the cluelessness of investors. This is what founders said. They don't even know about the stuff they've invested in. I met some investors that had invested in a hardware device, and when I asked them to demo the device, they had difficulty switching it on. And then another founder says, investors don't know half the time what they're talking about. A few were great, but 95% of the investors we dealt with were unprofessional. They didn't seem to be very good at business or have any kind of creative vision. They said angels were generally much better to talk to. Number 15, you may have to play games. One founder said the thing that surprised him most was, quote, the degree to which feigning certitude impressed investors. I don't think this just works with investors. I think it works in human nature, something that Nolan Bushnell, who's the founder of Atari and Steve Jobs' mentor, picked up on. He hired Steve when he was like 19 years old to work at Atari. And some of the advice that he gave Steve was, he says, I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are. Number 16, luck is a big factor.
(someone): That's the main message of what he's trying to teach us. He also has this—I think I talked about this before, but in other essays, he couldn't figure out—he would notice a pattern when he's doing like office hours with founders at Y Combinator, that the ones that were kind of lost or like kind of not doing well, they were weren't even using our product. They were building a product that they thought other people might want or trying to solve a problem that they didn't really understand. And that's a big problem. If you're not, if you don't love your own product, if you're not using your own product, there's nothing like to orient yourself around. So it's like, why don't you just write the story that you want to read, build a tool that you want to use. I mentioned this case explicitly because so many people get it wrong. Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you're lost. So I kind of just ran over the point that he was making there. There are a lot of forces that will lead you astray when you're trying to figure out what to work on. Pretentiousness, fashion, fear, money, politics, other people's interests. In other words, like distractions that get you off your true authentic path. But if you stick to what you find genuinely interesting, you'll be proof against all of them. If you're interested, you're not astray. And so when I read that the first time, I said, that may be my favorite paragraph so far.
(someone): Finishing things is not just an exercise in self-discipline. In many projects, a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage. So I got to pause there, because I had a weird idea that came to mind that was prompted by reading that. So it's like, listen, you just try to finish what you start, even if it's more work than you expected. Finishing things is not just an exercise in self-discipline. In many projects, a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage. I would say that's true for people's lives, too. I was trying to figure out. When you're reading these stories, you're not going to find many people, I'm talking about in entrepreneurship, not scientific discovery or something, you're not going to find many people that make their best business or their best product when they're 20 or 25. This happens so much, I was like, why do so many people wind up doing their best work many decades into their career? I think the obvious answer would be like, I was thinking about this is like, okay, well, yeah, it's like, they've had three decades as an entrepreneur to practice like they started a bunch of businesses. Now they know their industry better. They just understand the shape of the work and what they want to do. And I think that is true. But I one thing that I just can't let go of is, I think a key to doing truly great work is building a business that's authentic to you, to your true self. And what I realized is like, oh, yes, they have more experience, but they know themselves better.
(someone): Resulting from or showing sincere and intense conviction. I love that definition, intense conviction. The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. Key to doing great work. And how can you have a sharp eye for truth if you're intellectually dishonest? Another subtle component of earnestness is informality. It means focusing on what matters instead of what doesn't. What formality and affectation have in common is that as well as doing the work, you're trying to seem a certain way as you're doing it. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work. They expend little effort on seeming anything. Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness. This is hilarious. Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness. That's exactly what you need in doing great work. It is not learned. Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated sounding criticisms of them. It's easy to criticize, is true in the most literal sense, and the route to great work is never easy. And another thing, like, who cares what the critics say? The loudest boos always come from the cheapest seats. There's a theme that runs through a lot of the great founders, and it's the fact that they believe that their opinion on what they're working on, their opinion is greater than every other person's opinion around them regarding what they're working on.
(someone): One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge you get from experience is to know what you don't have to worry about. The young know all the things that could matter, but not their relative importance. So they worry equally about everything, when they should worry much more about a few things and hardly at all about the rest. and a source of this confusion about okay well like they're worried about everything equally when it's like just focus on the really important things and ignore everything else so the source of the confusion goes back to this is the problem with with school that it just fills your head with a bunch of nonsense so everybody almost by default will arrive at adulthood with a head full of nonsense and he says much of that nonsense left in your head is left there by schools schools induce passivity the sooner you overcome this the better Schools also give you a misleading impression of what work is like. In school, they tell you what the problems are, and they're almost always solvable using no more than what you've been taught so far. In real life, you have to figure out what the problems are, and you often don't know if they're solvable at all. But perhaps the worst thing that schools do is they train you to win by hacking the test. You cannot do great work by doing that. So stop looking for that kind of shortcut. Do not skimp on the work itself. Don't think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving you a big break. Even if this were true, the best way to get it would be to focus on doing good work rather than chasing influential people. It's that idea that you should try to be so good that people can't ignore you. People new to a field will often copy existing work. There's nothing inherently bad about that.
(someone): If you are earnest, you'll probably get a warmer welcome than you might expect. Most people, this is so, I love this idea. Most people who are very good at something are happy to talk about it with anyone who's genuinely interested. If they're really good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist's interest in it, and hobbyists always want to talk about their hobbies. Seek out the best colleagues. That is like the one line maximum of this section, right? Seek out the best colleagues. If you listen to the Mark Twain episode I referenced earlier, the best advice Mark Twain ever got that he followed for the remaining 44 years of his life was this American diplomat in Hawaii told him, you have great ability. I believe you have genius. What you need now is refinement of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. This is like the punchline for me. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with inferiors. Always climb. Paul Graham's way of saying that is seek out the best colleagues. Colleagues don't just affect your work, though. They also affect you. So work with people you want to become like because you will. And he's going to go into why, like great work happens in clusters. We just see this over and over again. In fact, it's not merely better, but necessary. Judging from history, the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not.
(someone): The result will be more concentrated. You'll understand it better. I don't even know why, but when I got to this section, I was thinking about this story I read in one of the biographies of Steve Jobs. They had spent so much time on this concept for the Apple stores. This was before it was like open to the public. And I forgot who the person was, but the guy helping. Steve on this they were working on this, you know for maybe I don't know like a year more than that and they're going they had built like this prototype of an Apple store and like this warehouse somewhere and They're Steve like picks them up to go like take a look at it and the guy had realized the day before He's like, oh my god We have this set up the incorrect way Like we should have it set up by like what the devices do or whatever the case was the important part was Steve's reaction. So the guy was like shit we put all this this time and effort into it We need to like destroy everything we did and start over because this other way is a better idea. And Steve flipped his lid, started getting upset, like yelling. Then he gets silent, right? Because he's just he has cancer. He's like very sick when this is happening. And he's just like, you know, I don't know if I have the energy to do this like from scratch again. And so then it's like complete quiet. They're riding in the car in complete silence. They get to the prototype where all the rest of the people, the other employees at Apple, are waiting for them. And then Steve quietly says, he's right.
(someone): The loudest boos always come from the cheapest seats. There's a theme that runs through a lot of the great founders, and it's the fact that they believe that their opinion on what they're working on, their opinion is greater than every other person's opinion around them regarding what they're working on. And they're too busy building their empires and making great products and creating a fortune for themselves and their family to stick their head up and start talking shit about what other people are doing. Paul's other essay, Life is Short, which I think you can read in like five or 10 minutes, perfectly pairs with this essay because you realize outside of taking care of your health, working on your mission, or being with your tribe, nothing else matters. Stop wasting your time. Focus on what you want to do. It's so hard. The route to great work is never easy. I doubt it would be possible to do great work without being earnest. Another sign of people that can do great work, they are willing to redo things. You may have to throw things away and redo them. You have to be willing to. When there's something you need to redo, status quo bias and laziness will combine to keep you in denial about it. Have the confidence to cut. Do not keep something that doesn't fit just because you're proud of it or because it costs you a lot of effort. In some kinds of work, it's good to strip whatever you're doing to its essence. The result will be more concentrated. You'll understand it better.
(someone): We're deep into this essay now. And now he finds ways to take ideas that he referenced, you know, maybe, I don't know, 5,000 words ago. This idea is like, don't spend too much time planning, get in, you'll start to learn more. And then he ties everything together. You're following your natural interest. You're having a bias to action. You're starting small. You're evolving it over time. And as a result, the final version is both clever and more ambitious than anything you could have planned. Begin by trying the simplest thing that could possibly work. Surprisingly often, it does. Do not try to cram too much new stuff into any one version. Evolve instead. And so there's a few times in the essay where he'll talk about the difference between what would you do if you're young or a little bit older. I like how he describes this. Use the advantages of youth when you have them and the advantages of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. The old also have the advantage of knowing which advantages they have. I like that line. The young often have them without realizing it. The biggest is probably time. The young have no idea how rich they are in time. The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in a slightly frivolous way.
(someone): There's nobody in between her and her audience. also can be applied in like the more like traditional like business product sense, where do you study the career of Edwin land, he starts trying to make, he's always making innovations, because he, you know, is creating new technology, new patents, new science. And he was, he was trying to sell into like, he wasn't connected to the end user. So he's trying to make headlights, automobile headlights, safer, but he's got to sell and convince people like a handful of people, maybe in Detroit. And when he did that for many years and failed, I was like, I'm never letting anybody else get in between me and the customer. So then he starts making consumer goods, right, that he can talk directly to the customer, which is his cameras. And I think that's a really important observation. Like, OK, well, I failed when I couldn't communicate directly with the end customer because I was selling to car companies as opposed to the people driving the car. But I succeeded wildly when I had a direct connection with the customers, the one actually buying my cameras. And so Paul says, avoid letting intermediaries come between you and your audience. It is so liberating to escape it that you might be better off switching to an adjacent type of work if that work will let you go direct. And then back to this idea, get away from the naysayers, flee the doubters like you don't need them. The people you spend time with will also have a big effect on your morale. Seek out the people who increase your energy and avoid those who decrease it. Do not marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work or sees your work as competition for your attention.
(someone): So at its core, the idea that Paul is explaining in this paragraph, we've seen over and over again. You got Buffett, Thorpe, De Gaulle, all saying the same thing. If you can just avoid dying, you will get rich. This sounds like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup. You may have heard that quote about luck consisting of opportunity, meeting, preparation. You've now done the preparation. The work you've done so far has, in effect, put you in a position to get lucky. You can now get rich by not letting your company die. That is more than most people have. and then he goes back to the grim part. We've seen a bunch of startups die. They generally don't die loudly and heroically. Mostly, they crawl off somewhere and die. When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they've become demoralized. You rarely hear of a startup that's working around the clock doing deals and pumping out new features. and dies because they can't pay their bills and their ISP unplugs their server. And then he gets into a main theme of his essays about just how painful and how difficult it is to create a company. If so many startups get demoralized and fail when merely by hanging on they could get rich, you have to assume that running a startup can be demoralizing. That is certainly true.
(someone): I just finished listening to this entire episode, and I mentioned in the episode that I was not expecting to do another Paul Graham episode, especially an episode on a single one of his essays. A few months ago, I spent three weeks reading and rereading all Paul Graham's essays. I did three episodes on them. It's episode 275, 276, and 277. But I suspected that this essay, How to Do Great Work, was something that was really special because the sheer amount of people that listened to this podcast that sent me this essay. And as soon as I started reading it, I got excited about it. And that's a good indication that I should be making an episode on it right now. And just one quick thing before we jump into the episode, I've made something that is exclusively for enthusiasts of founders, for people that completely understand the benefit of this kind of crazy, intense studying of the great people that came before us and how valuable it is to actually apply what they learned to whatever it is that you and I are working on. If that is you, I highly recommend that you sign up for the Private Founders AMA feed. I've been making short episodes every week based on questions that I get from other members. If you become a member, you'll be able to ask me questions directly. There's actually a private email address that you get access to in the confirmation email. I read every single one of these emails myself. I do not have an assistant look over them. I read every single one. The questions I get from these emails, I turn into short AMA episodes. So that actually allows other members to learn from the questions of other members.