How to Start a Startup - Paul Graham  ## Metadata - Author: **Paul Graham** - Full Title: How to Start a Startup - Category: #articles - URL: https://paulgraham.com/start.html ## Highlights - You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jap20mhsb0mf99ya3mtewghm)) - In particular, you don't need a brilliant [idea](http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html) to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jap22gwmfvhyjfsjrh4ywn88)) - look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jap23pva5gksbf9sqqc72dtf)) - Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route. Microsoft's original plan was to make money selling programming languages, of all things. Their current business model didn't occur to them until IBM dropped it in their lap five years later. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jap25trg4vnx3xtv9ejg540v)) - What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jap2666nsr48zqqx4jve1rp6)) - Tags: #ideas - When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough." ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jap2ae9g9qw8r7xs2csh1awh)) - People who don't want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it. Paul Erdos was particularly good at this. By seeming unable even to cut a grapefruit in half (let alone go to the store and buy one), he forced other people to do such things for him, leaving all his time free for math. Erdos was an extreme case, but most husbands use the same trick to some degree. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jap2mc929kxjgjfzef7nvdrs)) - The other approach is what I call the "Hail Mary" strategy. You make elaborate plans for a product, hire a team of engineers to develop it (people who do this tend to use the term "engineer" for hackers), and then find after a year that you've spent two million dollars to develop something no one wants. This was not uncommon during the Bubble, especially in companies run by business types, who thought of software development as something terrifying that therefore had to be carefully planned. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jap2w22a22aatcwcdhqzjfp2))