Since I live in a different town from my family, the holidays are the majority of the time I get to spend with my twelve year-old brother (we have a 17 year age gap).
Now that he’s nearly a teenager, he’s almost the age I was when I started thinking independently from family and friends. For me, a big part of that was discovering Paul Graham’s essays. Hopefully one day my brother reads through them (but I won’t force him).
This got me thinking: if I were to recommend them to him, would I want him to read them chronologically? Or should I point him to specific essays based on his interests?
Alternatively, if one were to compile all of Paul’s essays into a collection or a Hackers and Painters sequel, how would it be organized?
So below is my attempt at tagging Paul Graham’s essays by subject matter.
Startups – General Lessons:
- Default Alive or Default Dead?
- Change Your Name
- What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
- The Fatal Pinch
- Before the Startup
- Do Things that Don’t Scale
- Startup = Growth
- Black Swan Farming
- What Startups Are Really Like
- What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley
- Ramen Profitable
- Startups in 13 Sentences
- The Other Half of “Artists Ship”
- Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
- A New Venture Animal
- Six Principles for Making New Things
- The Future of Web Startups
- How Not to Die
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
- A Student’s Guide to Startups
- The Power of the Marginal
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
- How to Start a Startup
Startups – On Location:
- Where to See Silicon Valley
- How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
- Why Startup Hubs Work
- A Local Revolution?
- Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.
- Cities and Ambition
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub
- Why Startups Condense in America
- How to Be Silicon Valley
Startups – On Ideas:
- Fashionable Problems
- How to Get Startup Ideas
- Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
- The Hardware Renaissance
- Organic Startup Ideas
- Ideas for Startups
Startups – For Founders:
- Why It’s Safe for Founders to Be Nice
- Mean People Fail
- A Word to the Resourceful
- Schlep Blindness
- What We Look for in Founders
- The Anatomy of Determination
- Five Founders
- Relentlessly Resourceful
- Be Good
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup
- Learning from Founders
Startups – On Investors:
- The Ronco Principle
- Don’t Talk to Corp Dev
- How to Raise Money
- Investor Herd Dynamics
- How to Convince Investors
- Startup Investing Trends
- Subject: Airbnb
- Founder Control
- The New Funding Landscape
- High Resolution Fundraising
- The Future of Startup Funding
- How to Be an Angel Investor
- Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?
- A Fundraising Survival Guide
- Why There Aren’t More Googles
- The Equity Equation
- The Hacker’s Guide to Investors
- How to Present to Investors
- How to Fund a Startup
- The Venture Capital Squeeze
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckage
Philosophy
- General and Surprising
- Life is Short
- What Doesn’t Seem Like Work?
- The Top of My Todo List
- This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California
- Keep Your Identity Small
- Lies We Tell Kids
- How to Disagree
- Trolls
- How to Do Philosophy
- Stuff
- See Randomness
- How to Do What You Love
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
- The Word “Hacker”
- What You Can’t Say
- Hackers and Painters
Wisdom and Knowledge
- Novelty and Heresy
- The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
- How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
- How You Know
- The Top Idea in Your Mind
- How to Lose Time and Money
- Is It Worth Being Wise?
- Good and Bad Procrastination
- What You’ll Wish You’d Known
- Why Nerds are Unpopular
Charisma
Economics
- The Refragmentation
- Defining Property
- The High-Res Society
- The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company
- You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source
- Hiring is Obsolete
- What the Bubble Got Right
- How to Make Wealth
Immigration
Inequality
Patents
Credentialism
- The Lesson to Unlearn
- After Credentials
- News from the Front
- Two Kinds of Judgement
- After the Ladder
- Undergraduation
Math
Writing
- Write Like You Talk
- Writing and Speaking
- Persuade xor Discover
- Post-Medium Publishing
- The List of N Things
- Copy What You Like
- The Submarine
- Writing, Briefly
- A Version 1.0
- The Age of the Essay
Tech Industry Trends
- Tablets
- Apple’s Mistake
- The Trouble with the Segway
- Why Twitter is a Big Deal
- Why TV Lost
- Microsoft is Dead
- Web 2.0
- Return of the Mac
- The Other Road Ahead
Computer Programming
- Holding a Program in One’s Head
- The Python Paradox
- If Lisp is So Great
- The Hundred-Year Language
- Revenge of the Nerds
- Succinctness is Power
- What Languages Fix
- Why Arc Isn’t Especially Object-Oriented
- What Made Lisp Different
- The Roots of Lisp
- Five Questions about Language Design
- Being Popular
- Java’s Cover
- Beating the Averages
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications
- Programming Bottom-Up
Spam Filtering
Distractions and Addictions
- The Acceleration of Addictiveness
- Disconnecting Distraction
- The Island Test
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
Logan Frederick 