Quotes from Paul Graham

The standard to compare your software to is what it could be, not what your current competitors happen to have.

the way to get rich was not to create wealth, but to serve a ruler powerful enough to appropriate it. This started to change in Europe with the rise of the middle class.

pointy-haired boss doesn't mind if his company gets their ass kicked, so long as no one can prove it's his fault.

Now we think of the middle class as people who are neither rich nor poor, but originally they were a distinct group. In a feudal society, there are just two classes: a warrior aristocracy, and the serfs who work their estates. The middle class were a new, third group who lived in towns and supported themselves by manufacturing and trade.

I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you're designing something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots.

Number 1, languages vary in power. Number 2, most managers deliberately ignore this. Between them, these two facts are literally a recipe for making money. ITA is an example of this recipe in action. If you want to win in a software business, just take on the hardest problem you can find, use the most powerful language you can get, and wait for your competitors' pointy-haired bosses to revert to the mean.

Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)

People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage — just a shorthand — for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

But it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich. In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called "corruption") when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.

How can you see the wave, when you're the water?

It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars?

Technology had made it possible to create wealth faster than you could steal it. The prototypical rich man of the nineteenth century was not a courtier but an industrialist.

If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I'd take the first option. If I had children, it would arguably be immoral not to. It's absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty. If, as the evidence so far implies, you have to have one or the other in your society, take relative poverty.

If we were talking about Europe in 1000, or most of the third world today, the standard misquotation would be spot on.

Technology should increase the gap in income, but it seems to decrease other gaps. A hundred years ago, the rich led a different kind of life from ordinary people. They lived in houses full of servants, wore elaborately uncomfortable clothes, and travelled about in carriages drawn by teams of horses which themselves required their own houses and servants. Now, thanks to technology, the rich live more like the average person.

It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project.

Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired.

Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded.

When you catch bugs early, you also get fewer compound bugs. Compound bugs are two separate bugs that interact: you trip going downstairs, and when you reach for the handrail it comes off in your hand.

If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

It's hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn't yet been duplicated by technology.

An ideal world is left as an exercise to the reader.