paul graham essays pdf

I read and summarized all of Paul Graham's 200+ essays

Here's the summary on my site: https://www.jaakkoj.com/blog/graham

It's over 10,000 words long, so I also made a Google Docs version, in case that's easier to navigate: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16fj-veqvD7pQBWhdnM6REHl4zIe75z3bec0HIzTEtWM/edit?usp=sharing

It's all free - hope you find it useful!

Paul Graham has had a big influence on me so I hope this introduction/summary inspires folks to read his essays.

Let me know if there's something I can do to make the post more useful.

Recommend you change the wording from "Boring disclaimer stuff" and remove the negative sentiment. Here and anywhere else in your text. Your herculean effort deserves only positive sentiment. Great work!

Haha thanks! I didn't intend it as a negative thing - more like a "let's get this mandatory disclaimer thing over with, that's not what you're here for". But thanks for the positivity😂

For what it's worth, I think it's fine and I understood what you meant by boring disclaimer stuff.

Haha honestly I'm just glad that seemingly the biggest point of debate is the disclaimer, not anything in the actual content 😂

I didn't think otherwise! Just out of respect for your work. Bookmarking this 🤘

Great synthesis

Wow, mighty cool! Thanks for sharing this Jaakko. This needs to get on top of HN :)

Thanks Sébastien! I agree 100%. Not sure how to do that though - I post on HN and it drowns in the New page. Any tips?

I think that the title and timing of the submission does 80% of the job.. :p

Alright, I'll keep on trying. Catch me on the frontpage later this week ;)

Wow! Excellent stuff!

This is great work. Kudos. Did you post this on Hacker News?

Thanks! I did try posting on HN - didn't take off though. I'll try again another time, hopefully with better luck.

Thanks @JaakkoJarviniemi ! Imagine that took a ton of time. Appreciate you sharing.

Only nearly a year! And thanks :)

You seem to like very long articles... Is it for SEO? You'd get more readers with shorter ones. I tried to finish your article about 50 ideas... Too long for me. It would have been better to publish it in 2 posts I think.

Thanks for the feedback, it's always appreciated.

I try not to write for SEO. Instead, trying to satisfy my intellectual curiosity. So if there's room to discover something new about the topic, I'll write more about it.

Some people dig shorter posts, some longer posts. Personally, I don't care, so I'm not trying to make long posts, they become long organically.

Impressive work!

That's awesome dude, thanks for the content

This is great, thank you. It's refreshing to read a long-form piece so well formatted. Well played!

Thanks for the great feedback :)

Mad value. Thanks.

Thanks for the support!

Thanks for putting this together

You're most welcome!

Congrats on the amazing effort! Agree w/ @uuid16 → don't sell yourself short and change the wording to "disclaimer"

Reminded me of this recent tweet from the former ProductHunt CTO: https://twitter.com/andreasklinger/status/1450138312606375938?s=20

Anyway, back to your write-up: I really enjoyed the condensed 13-idea list at the beginning. Nice touch + gives an exec summary if you don't have the time (yet) to work through the 10k word extravaganza.

Greets and good job 🙌

Hahah that's a good tweet, and good advice from you. Thanks for taking the time.

I do have news to tell you: that 13-point summary is from Graham, not me. But glad it resonated😂

Thank you for you hard work @JaakkoJarviniemi !

My pleasure!

This is incredible! Thank you for sharing :)

Hiya Jaakko, Thanks very much for putting that together. It must've taken a while! Also, bookmarked both the post and your blog - looking forward to browsing through them both in a bit more depth.

Hi Janinah, thanks for the support! I see in your profile that you're from Leamington - I just graduated from Warwick uni so it's a familiar place :)

😄 No way it's a small world! I only moved here in February as my partner got a job here, however I absolutely love the area. Plus, I also graduated from Warwick Uni last year - level 5 Diploma in Coaching, so I could be a certified business coach.

P.S Been spending the last few hours reading through Paul Graham 101 and loving it! My favourite insights so far are:

• See startups as a path to wealth over a small period of time. E.g 4x years, so need to work hard in 4 years, rather than work slowly in a 40 year job.
• Barries to entry must be hard/ technical at every touch point, so competitors can't compete.
• Look at job listings to see where your competitors are at in their business.
• The article about how a startup equates to your salary being a multiplier of three (Well potentially) e.g. Software engineer on $80k could make $3 million

Congrats on the graduation :) It's a nice area for sure

Glad to see you engaging with Graham, though you better watch out - you may soon find yourself with 40,000 words of notes like I did😂

Oh wow! Nice job

Thanks and yeah I'll be careful havent brought myself to read the 'Writing Well' one though yet as I know it will be a whopper! 😅

Good idea hahah

You've done an amazing job, thanks for sharing!

So much efforts. Congrats for completing it.

Thank you :)

Wow. That must have taken some time. Thanks for the summary. 👍

Only almost a year 😅 thanks for the support!

Great work !

Really enjoyed this. Thanks for putting it together! Would definitely read a PG 201 :)

Thanks for reading! It's been quite a journey putting this together, I may need a breather before doing a 201😂

This comment was deleted a year ago.

Thanks Jaakko!

This is super helpful for a perspective reset 👏🏽

Yep! Glad you find it useful.

Nowadays, education is really vital. At university, I realized this. However, this is a lengthy procedure. I also had difficulty do my assignment . As a result, I decided to enlist the help of professionals to complete my work in a timely manner. As a result, I was able to submit my assignment on time. I can imagine how long it would take me to do this task.

Thanks for sharing it, as I think it took some time to make it! I think you made it with pleasure, as a person like me who doesn't like to write, wouldn't have made this. I am quite bad at writing so it takes me a lot to put myself to writing something, but if I have some important essays I am using editing services. For example, I have used the best admission essay editing service from https://www.topessayediting.com/ to help me to write an outstanding essay to stand out from the crowd and I succeeded only thanks to them.

Finding all of Paul Graham's essays in an epub/pdf?

Hi! I've recently read his 'Do Things That Don't Scale' essay, and found it incredible and full of practical advices. Any place to find an epub/pdf so that I can read it on my phone while on the go? Thanks!

I did that recently i'll upload it for you :) my case was - i wanted to print them all for my collection and to ease it on my eyes.

doc file https://www.dropbox.com/s/e2xueytqm38a0sj/y-comb-list.docx?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r7eu89rkz3caz00/y-comb-list.htm?dl=0

This is perfect! Are these all his essays? Because 'Do things that don't scale' is at the top of your document, yet it's not the newest/oldest essay AFAIK

Thank you for sharing :)

Or use Pocket (or something similar) - you can download articles for offline reading - I find it indispensable. Comes with a chrome extension too, well recommended :)

Btw PG rules

Well, its mostly his old essays, but theres this: https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp/1449389554

I wrote a python scraper, it's in pdf but the formatting is not so great.

https://github.com/Imran31/Essay_Scraper

Run and done

Short of previously published PDFs, you can 1) save each essay to Pocket for nicely formatted offline reading or 2) clip each essay to Evernote, also for easy offline reading.

About Community

The Leading Source of Insights On Business Model Strategy & Tech Business Models

Top Must-Read Paul Graham Essays

Entrepreneur, computer scientist, and venture capitalist Paul Graham is one of the most interesting and brilliant minds to follow in the startup world. He co-founded the accelerator Y Combinator and Hacker News; he also backed up many successful startups that turned into successful tech companies (like Airbnb ).

On Scalability

Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.

On Startup Ideas

The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they’re something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft , Apple, Yahoo, Google , and Facebook all began this way.

On Doing What You Love

There’s another sense of “not everyone can do work they love” that’s all too true, however. One has to make a living, and it’s hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that destination:

The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don’t. The two-job route: to work at things you don’t like to get money to work on things you do.

On Ramen Profitability

Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses . This is a different form of profitability than startups have traditionally aimed for. Traditional profitability means a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance of ramen profitability is that it buys you time. 

Read Next: Ramen Profitability , Profitability , Idea Generation .

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