Paul Graham Quotes on Business

About Paul Graham

A computer scientist, writer and essayist, entrepreneur and investor. His work includes the programming language Arc, the startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), co-founding the startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, a number of essays and books, and the media webpage Hacker News.

Quote

Do things that don't scale.

—  Paul Graham

Insight

In the very early stages of your startup, you should focus on doing tasks and activities that are highly manual, time-consuming, and personalized to get your first users and make them extremely happy.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Actively Recruit Your First Users Manually.
  • Deliver an "Insanely Great" Experience to Early Adopters.
  • Embrace Unscalable Manual Efforts to Learn and Iterate.