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 Second Amendment | National Constitution Center | Khan Academy

Testing the US Military’s Worst Idea

View All

The Real Reason Flames Don't Have Shadows

Uh, why don’t flames have shadows? Like, I mean, hello, it’s kind of freaky. But it has everything to do with what a hydrocarbon flame is. When you look at a candle flame, the part you can see is not a gas, and it’s not a plasma, believe it or not. The p…

Charlie Munger's Secret 4-Step Investing Checklist

I think that the methods that I’ve used, including the checklists, are the correct methods, and I’m grateful that I found them as early as I did. The methods have worked as well as they have, and I recommend that other people follow my example. Charlie Mu…

Worked example: Rewriting limit of Riemann sum as definite integral | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

So we’ve got a Riemann sum. We’re going to take the limit as n approaches infinity, and the goal of this video is to see if we can rewrite this as a definite integral. I encourage you to pause the video and see if you can work through it on your own. So …

Saturn 101 | National Geographic

[Instructor] With its gold color and stunning rings, Saturn is quite a planetary gem. Saturn is the second-largest of the eight planets, and it is about ten times as wide as Earth. Despite its size, Saturn is actually the lightest planet. It is predomin…

Relating unit rate to slope in graphs of proportional relationships | Grade 8 (TX) | Khan Academy

A farmer sold 26 kg of tomatoes for $78. Which graph has a slope that represents the cost of tomatoes in dollars per kilogram? Pause this video, work through this on your own before we do this together. So, if we’re thinking about slope, slope is all ab…

How to create a second brain in a foreign language- no more translating!

Have you ever experienced this before? You want to say something in your non-native language, but you always feel like you need to translate it first from your native language to your non-native language. If you want to become fluent in a language, you ne…

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

More Articles