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.

How to sell a $24,000,000 private jet.

Different mediums and the tone of the text | Reading | Khan Academy

View All

Earth Is Running Out of Space

7.7 billion. That’s the estimated number of people in the world today. To put it in perspective, that’s 110,000 NFL stadiums filled to capacity. If each of us were to hold hands, we would surround the entire circumference of the earth 345 times. The conce…

Keep Redefining What You Do

We just finished talking about the importance of working hard and valuing your time. Next, there’s a few tweets on the topic of working for the long term. The first tweet is: “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until…

Mr. Freeman, part 63

All right, hot-shots, no small talk or bullshit today! Just cold reality and stark, naked truth. Don’t wanna know, or friggin’ scared? Door’s there! Whattaya waiting for? Thanks for sharing, get the hell out! I’ve had it with your snobby fed-up attitude a…

Scientific Notation - Explained!

In science, we often have to deal with some very large numbers. For example, the mass of the sun. That is the mass of the sun. Two followed by thirty zeros in units of kilograms. That is two thousand billion billion billion kilograms. There has got to be …

109-Year-Old Veteran and His Secrets to Life Will Make You Smile | Short Film Showcase

[Music] Yeah, a lot of people say God kept you here to help others, but I don’t know why he kept me here. I can’t tell you. I ain’t talk to him; he ain’t talk to me. My name is Richard Ain Overton. I am 109 years old! [Music] I still walk, I still talk, a…

Impact of mass on orbital speed | AP Physics 1 | Khan Academy

A satellite of mass lowercase m orbits Earth at a radius capital R and speed v naught, as shown below. So, this has mass lowercase m. An aerospace engineer decides to launch a second satellite that is double the mass into the same orbit. So, the same orbi…

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

More Articles