Paul Graham(@paulg)

And peak golden age watch movement = the culmination of 700 years of work on mechanical clocks. Mech...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:45:57 GMT

And peak golden age watch movement = the culmination of 700 years of work on mechanical clocks. Mechanical clocks first appeared in about 1270 and since then many of the great minds of their times have worked on them. That's why I'm interested in watches.

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The cheapest way to get a watch with one of the great movements of the golden age is to buy a steel ...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:29:14 GMT

The cheapest way to get a watch with one of the great movements of the golden age is to buy a steel "cushion-cased" reference from around 1970. They're unfashionable now and can be got for under $1000. This has a cal 854, which has a reasonable claim to be the peak movement.

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Making your model faster is a very smart move when your customers are paying by the token.

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:55:13 GMT

Making your model faster is a very smart move when your customers are paying by the token.

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A couple days ago a founder sat thinking silently for a minute and fifteen seconds before answering ...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:45:09 GMT

A couple days ago a founder sat thinking silently for a minute and fifteen seconds before answering a question I asked. (This is an estimate, because I only started timing him after about thirty seconds.) One of the smartest founders I've met too.

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14 yo is fascinated by the idea that there are adults who not only listen to my advice, but actually...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:33:30 GMT

14 yo is fascinated by the idea that there are adults who not only listen to my advice, but actually act upon it.

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I often write "I'm not sure why" about something in drafts of essays, but these rarely make it to pu...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 01:58:59 GMT

I often write "I'm not sure why" about something in drafts of essays, but these rarely make it to publication without being followed by some guess about why. I don't have deadlines; I should at least try to answer.

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I wouldn't be surprised if there are several more back and forths. I have no idea who ends on top. I...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 01:34:44 GMT

I wouldn't be surprised if there are several more back and forths. I have no idea who ends on top. If AI tops out somehow, open weights win, and there are a thousand model companies whose moats are proprietary training data. Or four after a new JP Morgan combines them.

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A year ago lots of startups were tuning open weight models. Then the consensus became that this was ...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 01:28:10 GMT

A year ago lots of startups were tuning open weight models. Then the consensus became that this was a waste of time, because the model companies' next versions would surpass them a couple months later. Now tuning open weight models seems to be back.

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The one thing for sure that gets fixed in these conversations is how each company describes itself. ...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 22:12:52 GMT

The one thing for sure that gets fixed in these conversations is how each company describes itself. At this point, in the middle of the batch, these explanations are still often terribly confusing. But after I decrypt them I repeat the decrypted version back to the founders.

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YC doesn't have a word for this, but this is what it looks like when I talk to a whole bunch of star...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 22:10:24 GMT

YC doesn't have a word for this, but this is what it looks like when I talk to a whole bunch of startups at once. I only talk to each co for about 5 minutes, but it's like office hours: we go right into what they're working on, and often come up with new ideas for what to do.

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Just when you thought things couldn't get any dumber.

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 22:03:38 GMT

Just when you thought things couldn't get any dumber.

Dave Brown@dave_brown24

SCOOP: Trump has directed the Navy to tear out a complex system for launching fighter jets from its aircraft carriers and instead go back to using steam catapults, a move Navy officials have fought for years and will likely cost billions in extra dollars.

U.S. officials say Trump signed a national security memorandum today directing the change, which would involve removing the electromagnetic catapult system used by the ships in the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers
wsj.com/us-news/trump-…@MarcusReports

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Since everyone will ask, it's about some of the techniques I use in office hours for figuring out ho...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:48:44 GMT

Since everyone will ask, it's about some of the techniques I use in office hours for figuring out how to make ideas bigger.

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This gap before office hours was just big enough to start a new essay. I wrote 814 words of the firs...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:48:06 GMT

This gap before office hours was just big enough to start a new essay. I wrote 814 words of the first draft. (We'll see how many make it into the last one though.)

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@bscholl @maticrobots @ImpulseLabs I had a Matic robot cruising around the kitchen while I was doing...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 05:03:17 GMT

@bscholl@maticrobots@ImpulseLabs I had a Matic robot cruising around the kitchen while I was doing office hours today. It gave the place an appropriately futuristic air.

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I think at that moment the new founders started to grasp how hard startups are. Not just from what h...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:32:24 GMT

I think at that moment the new founders started to grasp how hard startups are. Not just from what he said, but his face as he said it.

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One of my office hours today was with a founder from 2011. Company's still going, doing pretty well....

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:27:00 GMT

One of my office hours today was with a founder from 2011. Company's still going, doing pretty well. I asked him to give some advice to the next group, from the current batch. He said the biggest test is your own psychology. Can you keep going despite all the obstacles you face?

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One of the main topics I talk about with the founders of the big, established YC companies is how to...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:21:23 GMT

One of the main topics I talk about with the founders of the big, established YC companies is how to combine work with family. It's a hard problem. But worth solving; arguably no problem is more worth solving.

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A lot of founders I talk to are worried about what will happen with AI. So am I frankly. But they're...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:17:18 GMT

A lot of founders I talk to are worried about what will happen with AI. So am I frankly. But they're actually better off than anyone else. If the world is going to get turned upside down, the safest place to be is in a small, fast-moving company that can easily change direction.

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AI may eventually turn starting a startup upside down, but it hasn't happened yet. So far the core o...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:09:37 GMT

AI may eventually turn starting a startup upside down, but it hasn't happened yet. So far the core of starting a startup is the same. You try to get growth by building what users need. But there are a lot of new things you can build; that's the biggest change so far.

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One common question I get now is how much of the standard startup advice is still true in the AI era...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:04:48 GMT

One common question I get now is how much of the standard startup advice is still true in the AI era. So far almost all of it. There's more difference between the advice I give different startups in one batch than between what I've given pre-AI and post-AI startups.

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This is the 47th YC batch. I missed talking to a couple during covid, but except for that I think I'...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:59:07 GMT

This is the 47th YC batch. I missed talking to a couple during covid, but except for that I think I've talked to all of them. Strangely enough I actually write new talk notes each time, though I bet there's a huge amount of overlap with what I've said in past years.

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As often happens, this exercise was also useful for the startups themselves. For example, trying to ...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:46:51 GMT

As often happens, this exercise was also useful for the startups themselves. For example, trying to cook up super ambitious future plans to present to investors would often result in genuinely good new ideas.

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The reason they're called vertebrae is that you can't expect Demo Day investors to remember more tha...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:41:32 GMT

The reason they're called vertebrae is that you can't expect Demo Day investors to remember more than about 5 things about you. So you want to decide in advance what the most important 5 things are and make them the vertebrae of your pitch.

Jason Freedman@jasonfreedman

PG used to personally edit/polish/rewrite every startup’s pitch. 

It was called the vertebrae session.   About a week before demo day.

He did it for my S09 batch where there was like 28 companies. 

I then saw him do it for my W12 batch which was like 100 companies. 

It was crazy,

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The reason we're standing next to the wall, incidentally, is to take advantage of the acoustic foam....

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:38:47 GMT

The reason we're standing next to the wall, incidentally, is to take advantage of the acoustic foam. That's what the spiky orange stuff is. Our architect Cate Courteau decided to own it instead of hiding it, and now it has become part of YC's visual identity.

Tyler Bosmeny@bosmeny

Some things never change

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Talked to startups at YC for 7 hours straight. I think that's about the limit. I didn't quite satura...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:29:56 GMT

Talked to startups at YC for 7 hours straight. I think that's about the limit. I didn't quite saturate demand, but I got within about 20 founders of it.

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@lreyzin So while AI could indeed give these fake scholars an advantage in publishing new work, it w...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:35:52 GMT

@lreyzin So while AI could indeed give these fake scholars an advantage in publishing new work, it will simultaneously make their previous work vulnerable in a way they never expected. And it's all out there, published forever, for any future technology to analyze.

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(Of course novelty is relative. I'm sure someone in the history of mankind has said something simila...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:32:31 GMT

(Of course novelty is relative. I'm sure someone in the history of mankind has said something similar. But it's certainly not a widely appreciated principle.)

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Rob Miles is worth following. He delivers the rarest thing of all: insights that are very general, b...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:29:57 GMT

Rob Miles is worth following. He delivers the rarest thing of all: insights that are very general, but also novel.

Rob Miles@robertskmiles

An important principle:
Never pay someone to remove a problem that they themselves created

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Is the term "sales" being replaced by "GTM"? Seems kind of bogus frankly.

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:29:53 GMT

Is the term "sales" being replaced by "GTM"? Seems kind of bogus frankly.

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You can tell no one knows that New York is the Empire State from the way everyone emphasizes the sec...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:04:52 GMT

You can tell no one knows that New York is the Empire State from the way everyone emphasizes the second word of Empire State Building rather than the first.

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You can be pro-meritocracy or anti-immigration, but you can't be both.

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 05:27:28 GMT

You can be pro-meritocracy or anti-immigration, but you can't be both.

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Once again, limit case: super programmer building a new project from scratch that duplicates a lot o...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:45:24 GMT

Once again, limit case: super programmer building a new project from scratch that duplicates a lot of the functionality of an existing service.

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Are the people who were enraged by this tweet going to be even more enraged when I tell them I met a...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:43:27 GMT

Are the people who were enraged by this tweet going to be even more enraged when I tell them I met a founder today who sometimes writes 50,000 lines of code in a day? Or is everyone now used to this?

Paul Graham@paulg

I met a founder today who said he writes 10,000 lines of code a day now thanks to AI. This is probably the limit case. He's a hotshot programmer, he knows AI tools very well, and he's talking about a 12 hour day. But he's not naive. This is not 10,000 lines of bug-filled crap.

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The Democrats made a huge mistake letting themselves become the party of pronouns and land acknowled...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:34:26 GMT

The Democrats made a huge mistake letting themselves become the party of pronouns and land acknowledgements. They should just ditch that stuff entirely. Especially since it doesn't actually do any good.

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Now that AI has compressed the design phase for so many products, there is going to be more demand f...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:22:28 GMT

Now that AI has compressed the design phase for so many products, there is going to be more demand for technologies that compress the construction phase. After we get those, the final frontier will be regulation.

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Startup idea: Rephrase output to preserve the meaning while obliterating the watermarks. This might ...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:16:30 GMT

Startup idea: Rephrase output to preserve the meaning while obliterating the watermarks. This might not become that big in itself, but it could make a great beachhead.

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One way to answer the question of whether we've achieved AGI is to ask what people in 1980 would hav...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:44:19 GMT

One way to answer the question of whether we've achieved AGI is to ask what people in 1980 would have said if you showed them current models. We're standing on the finish line, so we're uncertain. But anyone in 1980 would have said yes.

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I love the name Discovered Materials. IIRC the domain name was untaken, so they didn't have to pay a...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:40:13 GMT

I love the name Discovered Materials. IIRC the domain name was untaken, so they didn't have to pay anything for it.

Advaith Sridhar@advaith_sridhar

Today, we're introducing @discoveredmat . We build AI scientists that discover new materials for semiconductor chips.

We’re starting by releasing our work - hundreds of new materials discovered using frontier AI models, along with our benchmark for tracking progress in this domain, Material Discovery Bench.

To pursue our mission, we have raised $9 million from @LightspeedIndia (lead investor) , @ycombinator , @peakxvpartners , @paulg , @gokulr , @trq212 and many others.

🧵

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I was looking at a row of pies in a bakery this morning and I found myself thinking "Wow, that one l...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:17:32 GMT

I was looking at a row of pies in a bakery this morning and I found myself thinking "Wow, that one looks like it would hurt," and I realized I now see pies differently from most people.

Paul Graham@paulg

I made a deal with 12 yo that if he did well enough on his end of term exams, he could hit me in the face with a pie. He did well enough.

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17 yo asked what makes a good founder. I said being good at building stuff and being sufficiently fi...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 06:33:26 GMT

17 yo asked what makes a good founder. I said being good at building stuff and being sufficiently fierce. That's about it.

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The startups YC funds now are much more serious than they were in the supposedly good old days. In t...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:53:18 GMT

The startups YC funds now are much more serious than they were in the supposedly good old days. In the last couple days I've met with startups making optical switches, rewriting the software infrastructure of manufacturing, making nuclear reactors, and curing cancer.

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"Dial shows significant age-related patina."

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:18:16 GMT

"Dial shows significant age-related patina."

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I talked to a founder today who's doing a software startup after two previous hardware startups. He'...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:43:45 GMT

I talked to a founder today who's doing a software startup after two previous hardware startups. He's so much more relaxed that he seems a different person. Hardware is hard. It's at least possible now, but it's still hard.

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1.4^52 = 39.7 million. So obviously no one can keep this up for long. But it shows users like the pr...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:54:12 GMT

1.4^52 = 39.7 million. So obviously no one can keep this up for long. But it shows users like the product.

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I asked a startup today how fast they were growing. They said the current number was meaningless bec...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:50:40 GMT

I asked a startup today how fast they were growing. They said the current number was meaningless because it was just a spike from launching something new. So I asked how fast they'd been growing before the spike. 40% per week!

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A surprising amount of what I do in office hours is give founders permission to do something simpler...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:11:15 GMT

A surprising amount of what I do in office hours is give founders permission to do something simpler than they were planning to. I'm always saying things of the form "You don't need to x. Just y."

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I did office hours today with Assil Halimi of Apollo Atomics. Very, very impressive company. It real...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 02:14:16 GMT

I did office hours today with Assil Halimi of Apollo Atomics. Very, very impressive company. It really brought home what an opportunity we missed by ignoring nuclear power for 40 years. The answer was right there.

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I wonder if it will one day seem remarkable to historians that the population collapse wasn't due to...

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 01:58:52 GMT

I wonder if it will one day seem remarkable to historians that the population collapse wasn't due to AGI, but actually began a couple decades earlier.

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Another of the greatest automatic movements of the golden age: the Omega 561.

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:45:06 GMT

Another of the greatest automatic movements of the golden age: the Omega 561.

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"You're the boss. I'm just the guy who's right." — 14 yo

Paul Graham (@paulg) — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:34:04 GMT

"You're the boss. I'm just the guy who's right."

— 14 yo

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