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 Flush $5,000,000,000 Down the Drain - A Netflix Original Documentary

Rob Riggle Ice Climbing in Iceland | Running Wild With Bear Grylls

View All

Can China Reverse the Economic Crisis?

As you’ve probably seen over the past few months, China’s economy has suffered some pretty serious setbacks, and its citizens have felt the impact. As this chart from Simply Wall Street shows, most sectors have been very deep in the red over the past 12 m…

Multiplying fractions by whole numbers word problem | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy

Rishi spent 34s of an hour for 2 days working on his science project. Kyle spent 1⁄4 of an hour for six days working on his science project. Who spent more time on his science project? So we want to know who spent more time. To do that, we need to first …

Graphs of rational functions: y-intercept | Mathematics III | High School Math | Khan Academy

Let F of x = A * x^n + Bx + 12 over C * x^m + Dx + 12, where M and N are integers and A, B, C, and D are unknown constants. All right, this is interesting! Which of the following is a possible graph of y equal F of x? They tell us that dashed lines indic…

The Next Great Reset | Why The UK Is Collapsing

What’s up, Graham? It’s Guys here and it’s official: the global economy is tanking. In the last 24 hours, Hong Kong and Chinese stocks crashed to a 13-year low. UK’s Prime Minister resigned under financial pressure, holding the shortest term ever in Briti…

Introduction to division with partial quotients

In this video, we want to compute what 833 divided by seven is. So, I encourage you to pause this video and see if you can figure that out on your own. All right, now let’s work through it together. You might have appreciated this is a little bit more di…

How to Set Goals: My goals for 2018 ($1 Million in income)

So guys, if you want to achieve something, it’s not just gonna randomly happen to you. It’s not just gonna fall from the sky onto your lap and like, “Oh, whoops, there it is!” That’s not gonna happen. In order to get something, you really have to want wha…

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

More Articles