Best Paul Graham Tweets

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 4, 2026

#1

Man do I want Paraguay to lose. Not just because they deserve to, but because I don't want to have to watch any more of them.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 26, 2026

#2

Step 1: Invent a new extra-bad category of crime, like "hate crime" or "terrorism", with extra-harsh punishments. Step 2: Expand the definition of the new kind of crime to include anything, or anyone, that you want to punish extra harshly.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 30, 2026

#3

Explained to 14 yo how you can multiply numbers by adding their logarithms (and divide by subtracting them), and how before calculators this was a critical hack for doing calculations.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 25, 2026

#4

The best predictor of success for tech companies, at every stage from during the YC batch to public company with billions in revenue, is the rate of shipping new stuff.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 26, 2026

#5

College students use AI to do most of their writing. An increasing number of professors secretly use it for grading. In the limit case, AIs do all the work, and all the humans do is transmit what they create. A good compiler would recognize this as dead code and remove it.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 28, 2026

#6

In the future people won't believe it ever got this bad. But it did.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 1, 2026

#7

Y Combinator makes something people who make something people want want.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 2, 2026

#8

What's interesting about these questions is the ratio of how important they are to how often you think about them. Every company probably could and should do its own version of this. In fact it would be a useful exercise just to decide what the questions are.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 25, 2026

#9

I went back and looked at my old emails with Om, and it reminded me how nice he was. He was a genuinely good guy.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 2, 2026

#10

https://t.co/rn2w4RgVIa

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 26, 2026

#11

I am unreasonably excited about this new purchase. https://t.co/ub3L5GaNFK

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 26, 2026

#12

All he asked for this year was a 49ers jersey. Phew.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 3, 2026

#13

A friend came over to look at some old watches. But he showed up at the worst possible time: 2:11.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 2, 2026

#14

Someone asked why I like Boom so much. Partly because they're building supersonic jets! Partly because they're doing it so well. And partly because we've been through so much together; it was so hard for so many years.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 28, 2026

#15

14 yo was sent to my office to tell me "Dinner's ready." But I'm cooking dinner. (Lentils are boiling slowly on the stove.) So what this really means is that Jessica's ready to eat it.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 1, 2026

#16

14 yo asked me if I leaned more to the left or right. I was pleased to be asked this, because if there's no visible trend in over a decade of data, it means I must not lean too obviously either way.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 5, 2026

#17

"No one can beat death. The best you can hope for is a tie after extra time." — Jan Houtema

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 26, 2026

#18

"Literally from a hospital bed, he was telling me bugs." — Matt Mullenweg on Om

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 2, 2026

#19

"So you're saying <enormously elaborate thing you didn't even suggest>?"

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 26, 2026

#20

Noora Health is hiring a CTO. If you want to make the world a better place, it's hard to imagine a job where you could have more impact. They've already saved over 70,000 children's lives. Help them save more. https://t.co/B4Uacg2kOg

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 2, 2026

#21

There is something to this. There's definitely a "buck stops here" element to being a founder. But I think it's going slightly too far to say it's your number one job. Your number one job is to solve the important problems, and pain and importance are not perfectly correlated.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 1, 2026

#22

I just talked to another investor about this startup. I asked how fundraising went for them. "He started his fundraising calls at 9:00 and he was done by 10:30."

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 1, 2026

#23

My watch has π on its face. https://t.co/1VPqyovfXY

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 27, 2026

#24

Remember when the Boom XB-1 went supersonic? That was such an exciting day. https://t.co/u4LlVtBXTU

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 3, 2026

#25

The problem with black dials: less light bouncing up off the dial makes the crystal seem more reflective. It's like the way windows in a house, from the inside, seem more reflective at night. https://t.co/Vq3dhkLDnm

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 25, 2026

#26

Ten years in, Rippling is still shipping big new things. If you're an enterprise customer, this is the safest kind of company to buy from. They're energetic enough that you know you'll get the latest tech, but you also know they won't just disappear.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 26, 2026

#27

A watchmaker on watch winders: "Don't use autowinders. They grind your watch to dust."

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 3, 2026

#28

Someone asked if the US economy could be damaged by the high valuations startups get now, and I realized there's a natural protection against this. All the growth is concentrated in the big hits, and they are exactly the companies most able to grow into an "excessive" valuation.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 1, 2026

#29

Good portrait. Lawrence was at the height of his powers when he painted this, and he put a lot of effort into it. https://t.co/eGckl8v5Bs

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 27, 2026

#30

This turned out to be horribly prescient.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jul 5, 2026

#31

Looks legit. https://t.co/PGiKJSXEZA

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 26, 2026

#32

I can't believe this even worked temporarily.

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 30, 2026

#33

The Birth of Pete Davidson. https://t.co/RIuNH7aRXR

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 30, 2026

#34

This amazing WW II painting by Laura Knight is effectively a combination of a still life and figures in a landscape, because that huge barrage balloon works like, and is painted like, an object in a still life. https://t.co/nrILJ6HhSW

Paul Graham

@paulg · Jun 29, 2026

#35

"I feel like a spider who's caught an insect in its web." — Jessica after teaching a visiting friend to play Rummikub