Paul Graham: What does it mean to do things that don't scale?

less than 1m read

·Nov 3, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

What doing things that don't scale means specifically is doing things in a sort of handmade, artisanal, painstaking way that you feel like, yeah, it would be great if you could do things that way forever. But you, in the back of your mind, think to yourself, well, there's no way we can keep doing this and become giant.

What doing things that don't scale means is do those things early on anyway, because you know if you don't do them, you'll never be big. You've got nothing to lose, and also you learn a lot from it. You learn a lot.

So, I discovered a lot of these things that we teach startups at Y Combinator, or you teach startups at Y Combinator. I'm retired; I don't know if you know that. But a lot of the things you guys teach startups are things that I hit myself and didn't realize that they were actually common startup lessons.

One of them is doing things very manually for your early customers. Like, it's so important to get early customers that if you have to do a ton of manual stuff, that's okay. You'll learn a lot from it.

Grand Opening Of My First Restaurant Ever l Blue Bovine

From Ashes to Ink | Explorer

View All

Kevin O’Leary’s First Richard Mille Ever l Mr. Wonderful's Premiere

Hey Mr. Wonder, why am I standing outside a Richard Mill store? I wonder if I’m picking up my first Richard Mill ever. I haven’t bought this brand yet, I haven’t collected it yet, ‘cause I had a lot of pops with the size of the watches. But maybe they’ve …

Explorer Albert Lin dives into an ancient flooded tomb beneath a pyramid in Sudan

Diving this tomb is so high risk that we’re sending an underwater camera drone in first to see if it’s even possible. You guys ready? Yeah, we’re ready. Let’s go down. I’mma see how far I can get it down. Maybe I can get it right to the entrance. Cop…

Spooky Coincidences?

Hi, Vsauce. Michael here. You can practice speaking backwards, so when your words are reversed, they’re intelligible. But here’s something else that is weird. The digits in the speed of light are exactly the same as the latitude of the Great Pyramid of Gi…

Connecting f, f', and f'' graphically (another example) | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

We have the graph of three functions here, and we’re told that one of them is the function ( f ), one is its first derivative, and then one of them is the second derivative. We just don’t know which one is which. So, like always, pause this video and see …

Pompeii: New Studies Reveal Secrets From a Dead City | National Geographic

A there was in that moment, 79 AD was really, I can say, the place to be, but was really an important, important our little but important town. Inside the cast are the skeletons of these people. So these are just a human being of debt population living 2,…

Using the Teacher Skills Report to drive differentiation on Khan Academy

Today, I will show you how to use the skills overview report in the teacher dashboard on Khan Academy. Once you have logged into Khan Academy, go to your teacher dashboard. Once you are in your teacher dashboard, on the left-hand panel under Tools, click …

Paul Graham: What does it mean to do things that don't scale?

More Articles