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.

Deep Sea Shark Stakeout | National Geographic

Trig limit using pythagorean identity | Limits and continuity | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

View All

It’s Mind Blowing That Our Minds Can’t Be Blown

They’re scientifically minded types; it’s astonishing who say, “Perhaps we won’t be able to understand the next set of laws of physics. Perhaps we won’t be able to understand the aliens.” It’s nothing but the appeal to the supernatural. It’s logically equ…

The Long Road Home | National Geographic

All committee, Reds, red one. Keep your eyes open, boys. Over, guys. See what I’m saying? Where the hell is everyone? Hold position. Culver, you—I know you’re upset, but we talked about this, right? Look, it’s a little like football. I’m the team captain…

Raiding a Killer Bee Hive | Primal Survivor: Escape the Amazon

[Music] [Applause] What we’re going to be doing now is something that is really dangerous. The village has located an Africanized bee nest. Africanized bees are called killer bees, and the deal with killer bees is they were made by trying to develop a sup…

15 Things That Are Not Missing From a Rich Person’s Home

Here is something you didn’t know. The inside of a rich person’s house is usually more expensive than the acquisition price of the property, or it’s at least coming close. When you think about rich people’s homes, you probably picture gold-plated everyth…

Mesh current method (step 4 solve)

We’re working on the mesh current method of analyzing circuits, and in the previous video, we set up our circuit. We set up our mesh currents flowing around these loops within the circuit, and we solved for the easy currents. That was the, uh, the current…

Ray Dalio: The World's Greatest Wealth Transfer Has Begun.

You can’t spend more than you are without getting into debt, and if you have debt, you have to pay back the debt. The only difference is you can print the money. So the question is, what ends that? Or is there no end to that? Legendary investor Ray Dalio…

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

More Articles