Joined April 2008
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"You get the first by making something users like so much they tell their friends. You get the second by being in a big market. If you grow exponentially into a big market, your startup will become valuable, and you, as a shareholder, will become rich."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"You must look at the world around you and see how it's actually done. If you want to do it yourself, obviously you'll be forced to understand how it's done."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"How people become rich in your society is one of the most important things to understand about it. You can't let your beliefs about this be determined by ideology, or movies, or historical examples that are centuries old."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"the key is not exploitation but empathy. What do users really want? What could you do for them that would make their lives dramatically better? That kind of empathy is what we look for in founders, and what we cultivate in the ones we accept."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"Only by understanding users very deeply can you make something they love so much that they tell their friends about it, and only that can get you the exponential growth you need to make a startup really successful."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"understand some group of users so well that you can make exactly what they want. If you're young you can, and should, use the hack of making something for yourself. You understand yourself."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"This is one of those cases where your unconscious mind knows more than your conscious mind does. Anything that genuinely seems to you like it would be a cool thing to build has a high probability of leading to a good startup idea, no matter how preposterous it sounds."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"So how do you find startup ideas without looking for them? By working on projects with your friends. That's where the very best startups come from. Initially they're not even meant to be companies. They're just something people built because they thought it would be cool."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"Don't worry about the second number, the market size. Since you predict future demand, the market will grow. And it's always possible to expand into adjacent markets. All you need is a beachhead in the territory of unsatisfied need that you can expand from."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"Since your intuitions about other people's needs are usually a crap signal, and your own needs are an especially valuable one, you should usually listen to the second signal; you should make something you and your friends want."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"Whatever you and your friends start using now, everyone is going to be using in ten years."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"How do you do that? By feeling the need yourself.
usually young founders should make something that they themselves want. You don't have enough experience yet to know what other people need. your own needs are uniquely valuable, because your needs predict future demand."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"As soon as a new, satisfiable need is discovered, people rush to satisfy it. So you're going to have to discover a need that no one else knows about yet."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"So how, exactly, do you make something people like so much that they tell their friends about it? The problem with market economies, and also the great thing about market economies, is that it's hard to make something customers want that they don't already have."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"To grow at a consistent rate every month, you have to make something so good that people tell their friends about it. And in fact that's the other reason I always begin by asking founders their growth rate. It shows whether they've built the right thing."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"We've proved that it is in fact possible to earn a billion dollars, because it only depends on two numbers, one of which startups routinely hit without cheating, and another that cheating couldn't possibly affect."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"Obviously for you to grow 4000x, there has to be at least 4000x more demand. But that's all you need. And how could you possibly cheat to increase the market size?"
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"It's certainly not impossible to grow at 15% a month without cheating. Startups do that all the time. And how long you can continue to grow at that rate depends on the size of the market."
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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"You've seen for yourselves that there are only two numbers in the calculation, the growth rate and how long it continues. If it's impossible to make a billion dollars without cheating, which of those two numbers is impossible?"
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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Exponential growth is like magic. It generates outcomes that seem impossible. And that's why some politicians distrust it. They don't understand the math of exponential growth, so when they see people becoming what seems to them impossibly rich, they assume they must have cheated
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How to Earn a Billion Dollars: paulgraham.com/earn.html
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