Paul Graham

“They raised a $9.5M seed at a $95M valuation before making any revenue, with General Catalyst and Paul Graham as investors.”

“Paul Graham personally invested in 5+ of the same companies.”

“Raised a $6.2M seed led by CRV, with Paul Graham and Gokul Rajaram.”

“Paul Graham has this great essay called... How to Do Great Work.”

“Paul Graham co-signed Sam Altman famously... he said, like, the five best entrepreneurs... and Sam Altman. And at the time, Sam Altman hadn't had a huge exit yet.”

“Brian Chesky, when he... goes public with Airbnb, who does he write in the blog post? He writes... YC, you know, Paul, his first investor.”

“Discovered Materials AI-driven semiconductor materials deeptech firm raised $9M seed; uses AI agents to discover new chip materials with focus on thermal management. Angel investors, including Paul Graham, also participated.”

“Paul Graham wrote this essay called How to Do Great Work... he basically says, let your excitement or your interest be the motor of the boat as well as the rudder. So it's like, it's the motor that motivates you. And it's the rudder that guides you of which way to go.”

“Paul Graham taught every founder in this building two things. Make something people want and do things that don't scale. Both still govern everything. What's new is the multiplier on the second one.”

“20 years after Paul Graham cooked dinner in Cambridge for 8 founders who felt hopeless.”

“PG latched on to something where there are... new model... that's kind of as a whole has been the opposite of the schlep blindness instinct.”

“This was the thing I really learned from Peter Thiel and Paul Graham, both in two different ways, which is that the very best companies, the very best investment opportunities are almost never the ones that look really popular.”

“He's actually put himself in a position where he doesn't have to be an amazing investor. He has a machine and a business that makes him win... He actually had an idea, which is help make more companies possible. And he manifested that in a business that works.”

“Paul Graham said last night the new question that he asked all YC batch members is how do we AI-proof your product, how do we put in non-AI features that build defensibility.”

“If good taste means finding the right answer, then as taste spreads through a market, everyone's answers start to look the same. The better the judgment everywhere, the less any single act of judgment stands out.”

“I got this from Paul Graham where he said every startup if you see like a hockey stick growth curve then there's two questions you need to ask: are they doing some kind of hack that's unsustainable and gonna stop working number one and two is is the market big enough.”

“Altman, who Paul Graham famously anointed the inevitable king of the cannibals...”

“Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham is tired of AI-generated emails from founders.”

“He's an illustration both of that you can do it, but what you'd have to do in order to do it, right?”

“The talent pool expands in two dimensions. The people are better and there's also a lot more of them. And on top of that, they tend to cluster in certain places. And so the resulting concentration of talent is, I mean, it's really intoxicating.”

“YC is deliberately designed to concentrate all the things that are distinctive about Silicon Valley. It's like a little super valley within the valley... If the Swedish government designed a program to help Swedish founders experience Silicon Valley, they couldn't do better than this. And it doesn't even cost them anything because it's funded by Silicon Valley investors.”

“Paul Graham — Quoted as describing his role at YC as 'trying hard to prevent assholes from getting funded'”