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.

Rescuing a Fierce Leopard: See What It Takes | Expedition Raw

Getting Vaccinated at the Coolest Place 😎

View All

Lecture 5 - Competition is for Losers (Peter Thiel)

All right, all right, good afternoon. Uh, today’s speaker is Peter Thiel. Peter was the founder of PayPal, Palantir, and Founders Fund, and has invested in, uh, most of the tech companies in Silicon Valley. And he’s going to talk about strategy and compet…

The U.S. Economy Enters "The Most Dangerous Time" in History (Jamie Dimon Explains)

You said this may be the most dangerous time the world has seen in decades. Why do you think it’s the most dangerous time? Jamie Diamond, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, is one of the most revered bankers to have ever lived. And while you might say, “Well, come o…

Save the Ocean, Save Ourselves | Sea of Hope: America's Underwater Treasures

There’s been this arc to my career in the sense that in the beginning I just wanted to make beautiful pictures. But I began more and more to see all these problems happening in the ocean. Fewer fish in the places I used to see many fish, or not as many sh…

Demand curve for money in the money market | AP Macroeconomics | Khan Academy

What we’re going to do in this video is talk a lot about money, and in particular, we’re going to talk about the market for money. This might seem a little bit counterintuitive because we’re used to thinking about the market in other things, and we use mo…

2015 AP Chemistry free response 3a | Chemistry | Khan Academy

Potassium sorbate, and they give us its formula right over here, has a molar mass of 150 grams per mole. They put this decimal here to show us that these are actually three significant figures; even the zero is a significant digit. Here is commonly added …

How Finding Blue Whale Poop Changed My Life | Nat Geo Live

I was seeing six blue whales in an area the size of a soccer pitch. I’ve gone on to name them the “unorthodox whales,” because they actually break the stereotypes we had for this species. It has sent me on an incredible adventure. (audience clapping) It w…

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

More Articles