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.

Into the Wilderness: Trapping a Wolf | Life Below Zero

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

View All

The Ultimate Conspiracy Debunker

The Internet is like a breeding ground for conspiracy theories. While some are just stupid and funny, others promote ignorance and an unhealthy distrust. So we went to the Kurzgesagt lab and developed a foolproof system to destroy not all but a lot of con…

Make Time Your Friend, Not Your Enemy

In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dicken’s wrote, “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” What does it mean to live in the Past, the Present, and…

Handheld TESLA COIL GUN at 28,000fps - Smarter Every Day 162

Hey, it’s me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. There’s only a few times in your life when you look at something and you’re like: “You know, this can’t be a thing,” But it is a thing! This video is just like that. We’re going to look at an inventi…

Examples recognizing transformations

What we’re going to do in this video is get some practice identifying some transformations. The transformations we’re going to look at are things like rotations, where you are spinning something around a point. We’re going to look at translations, where y…

Khan Academy Ed Talks with Marc Sternberg - Wednesday, March 10

Hello! Welcome everyone to Ed Talks with Khan Academy. I’m Christine DeCervo, the Chief Learning Officer here at Khan Academy, and today I’m excited to talk to Mark Steinberg, who is the K-12 Education Program Director at the Walton Family Foundation. So…

Beta decay | Physics | Khan Academy

Did you know that paper industries can use radioactivity to ensure consistent thickness throughout the paper? That’s right! But doesn’t it make you wonder how do you use radioactivity to do that? Well, let’s find out. If you have a very heavy nucleus, th…

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

More Articles