About

Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor.

In 1995, he and Robert Morris founded Viaweb, the first software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998 and became Yahoo Store. In 2005, he co-founded Y Combinator with Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell, pioneering the modern startup accelerator model and funding thousands of startups including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit.

Since 2001, he has published influential essays on his website paulgraham.com, read by millions around the world each year. He is the author of Hackers & Painters, On Lisp, and ANSI Common Lisp.

A longtime proponent of Lisp, he designed and released Bel, a new Lisp dialect, in 2019. He holds an A.B. from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University, and studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

You can also find Paul Graham on:

Website: https://paulgraham.com
Twitter: @paulg

Articles

How to Earn a Billion Dollars 2026-06-01
How to Convert Between Wealth and Income Tax 2026-05-01
The Brand Age 2026-03-01
The Shape of the Essay Field 2025-06-01
Good Writing 2025-05-01
What to Do 2025-03-01
The Origins of Wokeness 2025-01-01
Writes and Write-Nots 2024-10-01
When To Do What You Love 2024-09-01
Founder Mode 2024-09-01
The Right Kind of Stubborn 2024-07-01
The Reddits 2024-03-01
The Best Essay 2024-03-01
How to Start Google 2024-03-01
Superlinear Returns 2023-10-01
How to Do Great Work 2023-07-01
How to Get New Ideas 2023-01-01
What You (Want to)* Want 2022-11-01
The Need to Read 2022-11-01
Alien Truth 2022-10-01
What I've Learned from Users 2022-09-01
Heresy 2022-04-01
Putting Ideas into Words 2022-02-01
Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste? 2021-11-01
Beyond Smart 2021-10-01
Weird Languages 2021-08-01
How to Work Hard 2021-06-01
A Project of One's Own 2021-06-01
Fierce Nerds 2021-05-01
Crazy New Ideas 2021-05-01
An NFT That Saves Lives 2021-05-01
The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty 2021-04-01
How People Get Rich Now 2021-04-01
Write Simply 2021-03-01
Donate Unrestricted 2021-03-01
What I Worked On 2021-02-01
The Airbnbs 2020-12-01
Earnestness 2020-12-01
Billionaires Build 2020-12-01
How to Think for Yourself 2020-11-01
Early Work 2020-10-01
Modeling a Wealth Tax 2020-08-01
The Four Quadrants of Conformism 2020-07-01
Orthodox Privilege 2020-07-01
Coronavirus and Credibility 2020-04-01
How to Write Usefully 2020-02-01
Haters 2020-01-01
Being a Noob 2020-01-01
The Two Kinds of Moderate 2019-12-01
The Lesson to Unlearn 2019-12-01
Having Kids 2019-12-01
Fashionable Problems 2019-12-01
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius 2019-11-01
Novelty and Heresy 2019-11-01
General and Surprising 2017-09-01
The Risk of Discovery 2017-01-01
Charisma / Power 2017-01-01
This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California 2016-11-01
How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub 2016-04-01
The Refragmentation 2016-01-01
Life is Short 2016-01-01
Economic Inequality 2016-01-01
Jessica Livingston 2015-11-01
Write Like You Talk 2015-10-01
Default Alive or Default Dead? 2015-10-01
A Way to Detect Bias 2015-10-01
Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice 2015-08-01
Change Your Name 2015-08-01
What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? 2015-02-01
What Doesn't Seem Like Work? 2015-01-01
The Ronco Principle 2015-01-01
Don't Talk to Corp Dev 2015-01-01
The Fatal Pinch 2014-12-01
Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In 2014-12-01
How You Know 2014-12-01
How to Be an Expert in a Changing World 2014-12-01
Mean People Fail 2014-11-01
Startup Investing Trends 2013-06-01
The Top of My Todo List 2012-04-01
Writing and Speaking 2012-03-01
How Y Combinator Started 2012-03-01
Defining Property 2012-03-01
Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998 2012-01-01
The Patent Pledge 2011-08-01
Subject: Airbnb 2011-03-01
Tablets 2010-12-01
The Acceleration of Addictiveness 2010-07-01
How to Lose Time and Money 2010-07-01