Paul Graham on ambition & big ideas
Graham argues that the biggest startup ideas repel you, and that you find them by asking how we'll seem backward to the future, by noticing where powerful people are in pain, and by trusting ideas that are wrong in all the right ways. He warns against attacking them head-on: start with a dinosaur egg, a small thing that can grow, keep a blurry Columbus-like sense of direction, and launch it as something that looks inconsequential. By 2025 he adds that a giant like Google falls only once its model becomes obsolete, as AI did to search.
14 points · 3 appearances · 2012–2025
How the view evolved
Find the dinosaur egg that grows into a giant → Beat Google by waiting until its model is obsolete
In 2012 Graham's route to 'the next Google' was a dinosaur egg: build a search engine the top 10,000 hackers use and grow from there. By 2025 he says you don't take on Google that way at all. You wait until things change so much that its model is obsolete, which is what happened when people started asking an AI for information instead of searching.
Up next
2009–2025 · changed view
“About a month after we started Y Combinator, we sort of stumbled upon the phrase that became our motto: make something people want. And we've changed our minds about a lot of things since then, but if I were choosing again today, this is still the one I would choose. I don't think you can get it down to three words — of course, if you could, I would be the first to try. Another thing we tell startups, probably the second most common thing we tell startups, is not to worry too much about the business model at the beginning. Don't worry too much about money — not because it's not important, but because it's so much easier than making something great.”
2014–2026 · changed view
“It turns out it's not that important to be smart; it's much, much more important to be determined. If you imagine this hypothetical person who's like a hundred out of a hundred for smart and a hundred out of a hundred for determination, and then you start taking away determination, it doesn't take very long before you have this sort of ineffectual but brilliant person. Whereas if you take someone who's super, super determined and you start taking away smartness bit by bit, eventually you get to some guy who owns a lot of taxi medallions — but he's still rich. Or like a trash hauling business or something like that.”
2017–2025 · changed view
“Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that with the robots as cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth, because you can rent it out — although that's probably a lower use of productivity — but land and actually doing some commercial enterprise. So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.”
2023–2026 · changed view
“The observation is that don't die is the most played game by everyone all over the world every day. You and I breathe every few seconds, we look both ways before we cross the street, we all play don't die. So it's played more than capitalism, it's played more than any religion. It's the most played game in the world.”