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.

The Man Who Killed Millions and Saved Billions (Clean Version)

YC Partner AMA at the Female Founders Conference

View All

A warning about Robinhood's 3% Checking Account…

What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here. So I’ll just get right into it. CNBC just recently published an article saying that Robinhood, the stock trading platform, is now going to be offering checking and savings accounts. My initial reaction to this was gre…

Ionization energy trends | Atomic models and periodicity | High school chemistry | Khan Academy

We’re now going to think about ionization energy trends. What’s ionization energy? It’s the energy required to remove the highest energy electron from an atom. To think about this, let’s look at some data. So right over here is ionization energy plotted …

Introduction to utility | APⓇ Microeconomics | Khan Academy

We are now going to introduce ourselves to the idea of utility in economics. Now, in everyday language, if someone says, “What’s the utility of that?” they’re usually saying, “What’s the usefulness of doing that?” Utility in economics takes that view of …

The Science of a Happy Mind, Part 1 | Nat Geo Live

Richard Davidson: The invitation in all of this work is that we can take more responsibility for our own brains. And shape our brains wittingly in a more intentional way by cultivating healthy habits of mind. (Audience applause) I’m a psychologist and neu…

A Brief History of Yellowstone National Park | National Geographic

(light music) - [Marielena] Yellowstone is epic, strange, and iconic. It is well-deserving of its protected status. But how did it come to be the world’s first National Park? (light music) Archeologists have found evidence of human activity in Yellowstone…

Ray Dalio Explains How the U.S. Economic Crisis is Unfolding.

So in either case, we’re going to have a debt problem, and the question is how quickly does it evolve. Uh, in the way that I described, world-famous investor Ray Dalio has been back in the news lately discussing his thoughts on the monster US debt proble…

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

More Articles