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Paul Graham
1964–Present · Co-founder of Y Combinator, Essayist
Built Viaweb (the first web app), sold it to Yahoo, then co-founded Y Combinator and launched more successful startups than any institution in history, Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Reddit. But his real legacy is the essays. Graham writes about life, work, and death with the precision of a programmer and the honesty of someone who knows time is finite. A Grithosian prunes the bullshit and spends their days on what actually matters.
Quoted in these Footings
CTL-VIII-0022“I'm furious and my thumb is hovering over send.”DTH-X-0027“I'm getting older and the days are just slipping past me.”CTL-VIII-0023“A door slammed shut and within a week I'd turned it into something better.”DTH-X-0029“I just married the person I love and I want to do this right.”DTH-X-0056“A peer died young and now I measure my whole life against theirs.”DTH-X-0057“We always said we'd travel after retirement and now they can't.”VER-XIII-0048“I doomscroll catastrophe until I'm too anxious to do anything at all.”CTL-IX-0079“I deliberately built a quiet, unimpressive life and it's exactly right for me.”