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.

Inertial Mass vs. Gravitational Mass | Circular motion and gravitation | AP Physics 1 | Khan Academy

How your image can MAKE or BREAK you

View All

Transforming a Studio Apartment | National Geographic

A studio apartment in the big city, a small and strange environment. This human has boldly traveled far from a natural countryside habitat but is not as adapted to this harsh alien world. It threatens her instinctual behavior. Her ears are assaulted like …

Shepard Tone Illusion .... and more!

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And today I released a brand new Vsauce Leanback. A playlist of educational videos from all over YouTube that I think are cool and I host sort of like a Vsauce TV show. You can start that by clicking the box up in the corner or…

Developing strategies for multiplying two digit decimals

Let’s say I want to multiply 3 point 1, or 3 and 1⁄10, times 2.4, which can also be described as 2 and 4⁄10. So pause the video and see if you can do this. Once again, I’ll give you a hint: see if you can express these as fractions. There are a couple of…

Clearing Everest's Trash - 360 | National Geographic

This is a landfill in the Sagarmatha National Park, home to the world’s tallest peak, Mount Everest. Members of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, or SPCC, collect and sort trash all the way up to Everest base camp, situated in the Himalayas. Eve…

PSYCHOTHERAPY - Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan was the greatest French psychoanalyst of the 20th century. He was also something that’s come to feel rather odd - an intellectual celebrity. As much of a focus of gossip and curiosity as a pop star. He hung out with famous artists and writer…

Meaning of absolute value

In this video, we’re going to introduce ourselves to the idea of absolute value, which you can view as how far you are from zero. So, for example, let’s say that we have a bunch of people living on a street, and let’s say that we say that the school is a…

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

More Articles