Paul Graham

Sept 2026

Paul Graham

Making Startups Powerful

One of the most useful heuristics I have when doing office hours with startups is to ask: what would make this company more powerful? Asking how the company could make more money is a good heuristic too, but it tends to yield incremental im

Paul Graham

Jun 2026

Paul Graham

How to Earn a Billion Dollars

(This is based on a talk I gave at the Oxford Union.)Since this is apparently the future prime ministers' club, I'm going to tell you about something it would be good if more politicians understood: I'm going to tell you how people become b

Paul Graham

May 2026

Paul Graham

How to Convert Between Wealth and Income Tax

How do you convert between wealth and income tax? If a government imposes a wealth tax of 1%, what's the equivalent in income tax?It's clear from the way most politicians talk about the subject that they not only don't know the answer, but

Paul Graham

Mar 2026

Paul Graham

The Brand Age

In the early 1970s, disaster struck the Swiss watch industry. Now people call it the quartz crisis, but in fact it was a compound of three separate disasters that all happened at about the same time.The first was competition from Japan. The

Paul Graham

Jun 2025

Paul Graham

The Shape of the Essay Field

An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But there are three different reasons people might not know something, and they yield three very different kinds of essays.One reason people won't know something is if it's not

Paul Graham

May 2025

Paul Graham

Good Writing

There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about important things. It might seem as if these two kinds of good w