Style, taste, and startups

September 2021

Richard Hamming on Style and Taste

The race is not to the swiftest. The guy who works hardest doesn't win. The person who works on the right problem at the right time in the right way is what counts – and nothing else. The right problem at the right time in the right way counts and nothing else counts. Nothing. You've got to do that. But it's easy - there's a million races being run. You've just got to get in one of them and win.

Paul Graham Quotes on Startups

  • "Make something people want."
  • "Explain what you've learned from users."
  • "Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed. YC improves focus."
  • "A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing. The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. The next best, for startups that aren't charging initially, is active users."
  • "Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about startups. The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as "earnest." This is not by itself a guarantee of success. You could be earnest but incapable. But when founders are both formidable (another of our words) and earnest, they're as close to unstoppable as you get."
  • "If we imagine motives as vectors, it [earnestness] means both the direction and the magnitude are right."
  • "Most startups fail because they don't make something people want, and the reason most don't is that they don't try hard enough. In other words, starting startups is just like everything else. The biggest mistake you can make is not to try hard enough. To the extent there's a secret to success, it's not to be in denial about that."
  • "No idea for a product could ever be so clever as the ones you can discover by smashing a beam of prototypes into a beam of users."
  • "Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically."