Paul Graham

Paul Graham (born November 13, 1964 in Weymouth, England) is a British-American computer scientist, essayist, and venture investor. He is best known as a co-founder of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator he launched in March 2005 with Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell. Before YC he co-founded Viaweb, an early online-store software company that became Yahoo Store after Yahoo acquired it in 1998 for roughly $49 million in stock.

Graham studied philosophy at Cornell University and earned a PhD in computer science from Harvard in 1990. He is a long-time advocate of Lisp and wrote two influential books on the language — On Lisp (1993) and ANSI Common Lisp (1995). Viaweb was itself written in Common Lisp, and Graham later cited that choice as a key competitive advantage in essays such as "Beating the Averages."

Viaweb and Yahoo

Graham co-founded Viaweb in 1995 with Robert Morris and, shortly after, Trevor Blackwell. It was one of the first software-as-a-service companies, letting merchants build online stores through a web browser at a time when most software still shipped on disks. Yahoo acquired Viaweb in 1998 and rebranded it as Yahoo Store. Graham used the proceeds to step away from operating roles and begin writing the essays at paulgraham.com that built his public reputation.

Y Combinator

In March 2005 Graham, Livingston, Morris, and Blackwell founded Y Combinator in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The original "Summer Founders Program" funded eight companies — including Reddit — with very small checks in exchange for small equity stakes, and ran them through a three-month batch ending in Demo Day. The model — fixed-size investments, fixed-length batches, large cohorts — was novel, and is now the template most accelerators use. Graham served as president until February 2014, when he handed the role to Sam Altman and shifted to writing.

Graham also created Hacker News in 2007, originally as a side project to test the Arc programming language. It quickly became the default discussion site for the YC community and the broader software industry.

Essays

Graham's essays at paulgraham.com are widely read across the tech industry. Recurring themes include startups, programming languages, wealth, schools, and how to think. Notable pieces include:

• "How to Start a Startup" (2005) — the talk that effectively launched YC.
• "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" (2009) — on why interrupting a programmer's afternoon is more expensive than interrupting a manager's.
• "Do Things That Don't Scale" (2013) — on hand-recruiting early users.
• "Hackers and Painters" (2003) — the title essay of his 2004 book of the same name.

The book Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age collects fifteen of these essays and remains his most cited published work.

Personal

Graham is married to Jessica Livingston, whom he co-founded Y Combinator with; they have two sons. He lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the San Francisco Bay Area through the YC years and later moved with his family to England.