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.

Two Vortex Rings Colliding in SLOW MOTION - Smarter Every Day 195

10 Good Problems You Want To Have

View All

How Do Honeybees Get Their Jobs? | National Geographic

The honeybee is one of the most collaborative insects in the world. Each hive is comprised of thousands of bees working together in order to build and sustain a colony. Within the colony, each bee has a specific role to play, a job. These are jobs like fo…

Density curve worked example | Modeling data distributions | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

Consider the density curve below. It’s depicted right over here; it’s a little unusual looking. It looks more like a triangle than our standard density curves, but it’s valid. Which of the following statements are true? Choose all answers that apply: Th…

Being a CEO (What they don’t tell you)

What’s your favorite position?” he asked. She said, “CEO.” “Are you for real?” Okay, the media glamorizes these high-power CEOs without actually revealing what goes on behind the scenes. In a recent interview with Jensen Huang, the CEO of the most valu…

Andrew Mason at Startup School SV 2014

That was a really good intro for making it up just then, and it definitely sounded like that, like it was bad in the way jazz is bad. Well, you’re dodging the question of that wonderful music we were just listening to from your album, “Hardly Working.” P…

Magic Tricks with Larry Wilmore | StarTalk

Anytime I interview somebody, no matter who they are, I want to know if they have some hidden geek credentials. Almost everybody does; they just don’t admit to it in any other interview because they don’t get any street cred for doing so. But on Star Talk…

if-elif-else | Intro to CS - Python | Khan Academy

We can use an if statement to control that a particular block of code only executes when the condition evaluates to true. But what if we want to do something else only when the condition evaluates to false? Well, we can add another if statement and try an…

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

More Articles