What Paul Graham Got Right (and the One Place I Disagree)
If you build things, Paul Graham already had most of your good ideas a decade ago, wrote them more clearly than you will, and put them somewhere you can read for free. Honest thing to do is admit the debt up front.
The one he got most right — the one that took me years to feel in my hands instead of just nod at — is do things that don’t scale. Every instinct of a technical person is to automate first, build the machine before there’s anything for it to do. PG’s point is that the unscalable stuff — recruiting users one by one, doing the work by hand, embarrassing yourself in someone’s inbox — isn’t a phase you suffer before the real work. It is the real work, early on. It’s how you find out what the machine should even do.
Second thing he got right: the maker’s schedule versus the manager’s. A maker needs a long uninterrupted block or the day is dead. A single meeting at 2pm doesn’t cost an hour, it costs the whole afternoon, because it cuts the runway in half from both ends. I’ve reorganized my life around protecting those blocks and everything good I’ve built happened inside one.
Here’s where I disagree, and it’s not small. PG’s worldview assumes the goal is to grow — one person to many, hire, scale, become a company. The whole YC machine runs on that assumption. But there’s a builder he undercounts: the one who wants to build excellent things alone, never wants employees, never wants a board, never wants the thing to become a job for forty people. For that builder, growth past a point isn’t success. It’s the moment the work stops being the work.
I’ve started several things. The pattern in me isn’t a failure to scale. It’s a preference for zero-to-one and an allergy to one-to-a-hundred. PG would read that as a bug. I’ve come to read it as a spec. Not everyone is building a rocket. Some of us are trying to build the best possible thing, ship it, and move to the next idea before the org chart shows up.
So: take the unscalable advice, guard the maker’s schedule, pay the man his due. Just don’t let the YC frame convince you that staying small is failing. Sometimes the most ambitious move is to keep your hands on the work and refuse to manage anyone — including the version of yourself that wants to be a CEO.
p.s. — he’d probably have a clean essay explaining exactly why I’m wrong about this. I’m choosing not to read it.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.