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 Stock Market Is ABOUT TO BOTTOM

Estimating adding fractions with unlike denominators

View All

Curvature formula, part 1

So, in the last video, I talked about curvature and the radius of curvature. I described it purely geometrically, where I’m saying you imagine driving along a certain road. Your steering wheel locks, and you’re wondering what the radius of the circle that…

Extinct Sloth Fossils Discovered In Underwater Cave | National Geographic

[Music] We don’t know how the sloths ended up in the cave. Our working hypothesis is that the sloth entered the cave in order to look for water, uh, and died in those positions. Then what happened was water level then rose, submerging the sloth remains, p…

8 Animal Misconceptions Rundown

8) Let’s talk about Lemmings. When you hear the word “lemmings,” you might think of two things: this video game and some sort of small creature that suicidally leaps off cliffs when its population grows too large. In case you didn’t know, lemmings are rea…

Surrounded By Monkeys: What This Photographer Loves About His Job | National Geographic

I’ve been studying gelat monkeys on and off for eight years now, and I’ve seen some incredible things. Whether it’s the live birth of a gelat infant from just a few meters away, to um some intense fights where I’m just kind of stuck in the middle and gela…

Proof of the derivative of cos(x) | Derivative rules | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

What I’m going to do in this video is make a visual argument as to why the derivative with respect to X of cosine of x is equal to sin of X. We’re going to base this argument on a previous proof we made that the derivative with respect to X of sin of X is…

Enterprise Sales | Startup School

[Music] My name is Pete Kuman. I’m a group partner at YC and a YC Alum. I was co-founder and CTO of Optimizely in the winter 2010 batch. In this talk, I’m going to walk step by step through the process of closing your first Enterprise customers. I’m goin…

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

More Articles