Paul Graham is famous as a cofounder of Ycombinator. Paul Graham is probably a little less famous for his essays that can be found on his website, paulgraham.com. Most to say all his essays are worth reading.

Paul Graham just gave an interview that is about 20 minutes long, Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders. You can listen to it, you can read the transcripts. You can also read what I liked or liked less !

What I like :

– Most of starting a startup is the same. Most of starting a startup is always the same, right? In, you know, microprocessors or AI or like in the internal combustion engine, it’s always the same stuff.

– That um the way you make a new Google is not by attacking them head on. You have to wait for things to change so much that their model is obsolete. […] And that’s what openAI is. I don’t use Google anymore. I don’t use searches. That what I really wanted from searches was not web pages. I wanted information. And I’m sure everyone’s now had this experience.

– [Can you tell me a story about a founder where when they started YC, they were maybe not ambitious enough and then they became very ambitious during the batch?] So the one case where you see founders it’s not that they lack ambition, it’s more like they’ve been trained not to show it. Because when you’re young, you’re often in situations where you’re supposed to be obedient, you’re not supposed to like go off and do what you want, you’re supposed to do what people tell you. Maybe you have pushy parents. Who tell you to do what they want, right? And so you’ve never you’ve never let yourself go. That’s the one case. But even then I would argue that the person was ambitious, they’d just been trained not to show it.

– [About the word formidable]. We already had this word before we started YC, like for a certain a certain kind of person. And I described it in an essay. I said, I think that it’s someone who can get what they want. Do you get what you want? Because how formidable are you if you don’t get what you want. It’s someone who gets what they want in any situation. And so if you invest in them and you have stock in their company and they have stock in this company, your interests are aligned. If they get what they want, you get what you want. So that’s why investors want people who are formidable. Pretty good. Yeah, because they get a part of what the founder gets.

What I like less

– [How does being in a batch like YC give founders an advantage?] One is starting a startup is normally a very lonely business. […] . And so this is like working in an office with all these colleagues, except you’re all working on your own startup. So there’s that. You have colleagues. You can also learn from the what the other startups are doing at the same time you are. So you have some technical problem. Probably somebody in the batch had that problem. You can just ask them how they solved it, right? And another advantage is what we call the YC GDP. Which is you have some sort of product, you can sell it to the startups in your batch.

This looked a little weak to me as an advantage. I think the real advantage is the access to an external network and PG does not say it.