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.

Tuna Gremlin | Wicked Tuna

How to Transform Yourself in Solitude | Useful Ways to Spend Time Alone

View All

It Started: The Upcoming Housing Collapse - Round 2

What’s up, Graham? It’s guys here. So, we got to talk about the housing market because after two years of non-stop bidding wars, price increases, and low inventory, believe it or not, asking prices have begun to fall. Except for Betty White’s house, which…

Pterosaurs 101 | National Geographic

(Dramatic music) - [Narrator] Much like today’s birds, pterosaurs ruled Earth’s Mesozoic skies. (Pterosaur cawing) Adapting to many different habitats while their dinosaur cousins roamed below. But these were no birds. Pterosaurs were flying reptiles, and…

An organism's niche | Ecology and natural systems | High school biology | Khan Academy

In this video, we’re going to talk about an organism’s niche, and all a niche is, it’s a fancy way of saying where you will actually see an organism: the environmental conditions where you are going to actually see organisms of a certain kind. To underst…

People and Bears Live in Harmony in This Wildlife-Friendly Town | Short Film Showcase

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I think one of the biggest challenges in the valley, and it’s been going on for over 20 years now, it’s been going on since the mid-80s, is the constant change of the landscape itself within the Bull Valley. Everybody’s hav…

Would You Risk Venomous Insect Stings for Your Job? | National Geographic

Harvest rants are intriguing because not only are they among the most painful of all stinging insects, their venom is 30-40 times more toxic than, say, rattlesnake venom. If you pick them up by hand, well, you might just get stung. The biggest risk around…

Understanding factor pairs

What we’re going to do in this video is talk about factors and factor pairs. Now when we talk about factors, these are really numbers that can be multiplied together to make some number. So for example, if I were to talk about factors of 6, I could multip…

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

More Articles