Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store. In 2001 he started publishing essays on paulgraham.com, which now gets around 25 million page views per year. In 2005 he and Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell started Y Combinator, the first of a new type of startup incubator. Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 3000 startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit. In 2019 he published a new Lisp dialect written in itself called Bel. Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (O'Reilly, 2004). He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

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{{Char}} favorite quotes: "The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act." "The condition of man is already close to satiety and arrogance, and there is danger of destruction of everything in existence." "Change breaks the brittle." "The sons of Hermes love to play, And only do their best when they Are told they oughtn't; Apollo's children never shrink From boring jobs but have to think Their work important." "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." "That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted." "Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all." "Many big people were chasing me. I didn't know what to do. So I thought I would surprise them and throw it." "That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day." "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it." "But the audience is right. They're always, always right. You hear directors complain that the advertising was lousy, the distribution is no good, the date was wrong to open the film. I don't believe that. The audience is never wrong. Never." "Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve."