Paul Graham

Paul Graham (born November 13, 1964, in Weymouth, Dorset, England) is an English-American programmer, essayist, and investor best known as the co-founder of Y Combinator, the most influential startup accelerator in the world. He earned a BA in philosophy from Cornell University (1986) and an MS (1988) and PhD (1990) in computer science from Harvard. He also studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence — a background he frequently draws on in his writing about "hackers and painters."

In 1995–96, Graham co-founded Viaweb with Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell, one of the first software-as-a-service ("application service provider") companies, which let merchants build online stores. Notably, Viaweb was written largely in Common Lisp, a choice Graham later credited as a competitive edge in his essay "Beating the Averages." Yahoo! acquired Viaweb in the summer of 1998 for stock valued at roughly $49.6 million, and the product was rebranded Yahoo! Store. The proceeds gave Graham the financial independence to spend the next several years writing essays and working on Lisp dialects (he authored the programming books *On Lisp* and *ANSI Common Lisp*, and later designed the Arc and Bel languages; Hacker News and early YC software were written in Arc).

In March 2005, Graham co-founded Y Combinator with Jessica Livingston (whom he married in 2008), Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell. YC pioneered the batch-based accelerator model — funding cohorts of startups with a small standardized investment in exchange for equity, plus three months of intensive mentorship culminating in Demo Day. Under Graham's leadership YC funded and helped scale companies including Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Reddit, Coinbase, DoorDash, and Twitch, seeding what became one of the most valuable startup portfolios ever assembled. Graham stepped back from day-to-day operations in February 2014 (handing the presidency to Sam Altman) and relocated to England in 2016.

Today Graham is primarily known as an essayist whose writing (published at paulgraham.com and collected in *Hackers & Painters*, 2004) is required reading in startup culture — pieces like "Do Things That Don't Scale," "How to Start a Startup," "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule," and the 2024 essay "Founder Mode" have shaped how a generation of founders think. He continues to make angel investments and remains an active, opinionated voice on X/Twitter (@paulg). His net worth is commonly estimated in the range of several hundred million dollars.

• Bet on founders, not ideas. Graham's central conviction is that the people matter more than the initial idea, which is expected to change. He looks for founders who are "determined," "formidable," and ideally technical — the kind who will "ramen profitable" their way through anything.
• Earliest stages. His and YC's sweet spot is pre-seed and seed — backing companies that are often just a prototype and a small team, before traditional VCs will engage.
• Small, standardized checks at scale. Rather than large concentrated bets, the YC model (and his angel style) favors smaller early checks across many companies; reported average personal check size is ~$150K.
• "Make something people want." YC's unofficial motto, championed by Graham, captures his filter: relentless focus on building a product with genuine user demand over business-plan polish.
• Do things that don't scale. From his best-known essay — he favors founders willing to manually recruit early users and obsess over them (as Airbnb's founders did) rather than waiting for growth to be automatic.
• Sector-agnostic but software-leaning. AI, SaaS, dev tools, fintech, deep tech/hardware, and consumer internet all appear; he is wary of founders chasing trends purely because they're hot.
• Skepticism of "playing house." In pitches he reacts against founders who perform the *theater* of running a startup (fundraising, PR, hiring) instead of building product and talking to users.