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.

Photo Walk in Napa Valley | National Geographic

Variables and assignment | Intro to CS - Python | Khan Academy

View All

15 Things to STOP EXPECTING from Other People

Your life picks up once you realize you’re in the driver’s seat, not the passenger seat. Everyone else might hop on and off the you bus, but they’re not the ones holding the steering wheel. This doesn’t mean you should become a lone wolf, no, but there’s …

First-order reactions | Kinetics | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

Let’s say we have a hypothetical reaction where reactant A turns into products, and that the reaction is first order with respect to A. If the reaction is first order with respect to reactant A, for the rate law we can write that the rate of the reaction …

Money creation in a fractional reserve system | Financial sector | AP Macroeconomics | Khan Academy

Let’s say for some reason you had lent the government one thousand dollars, and so the government has given you a formally issued piece of paper that says, “Hey, we the government owe you one thousand dollars.” This is issued by the treasury. This could b…

Threshold for low percentile | Modeling data distributions | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

The distribution of average wait times in drive-thru restaurant lines in one town was approximately normal, with a mean of 185 seconds and a standard deviation of 11 seconds. Amelia only likes to use the drive-through for restaurants where the average wai…

💖 The History of The Tiffany 💖

Tiffany is a very neon 80s name, and not without reason, it exploded in popularity during the decade. But despite Tiffany’s modern sound, the name wasn’t born in the 80s. Tiffany is at least 80 decades old. [“OMG that’s like, positively medieval.” “How i…

Erin McCoy and Kevin O'Leary Muskoka boat ride discussing philanthropy

I’m here with my great friend Kevin O’Leary, and we are in the beautiful Muskoka on Lake Joseph. We’re going for a little boat cruise now. Kevin, you and I have a lot in common, and one thing in particular is about educating people on money, especially wo…

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

More Articles