Paul Graham Quotes

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.

No business in the world has ever made more money with poorer management.

I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it... Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business.

My business is hurting people.

After Scour, I started a company called Red Swoosh. The idea was to take those litigants who sued us for a huge amount of money and turn them into customers with the same technology. I wanted to get them to pay me. It was a revenge business.

There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster.

I think with every successful consumer Internet business, there will be lawyers that are interested in going after your company, especially when they think that there's a financial incentive.

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.

About 10 million people start a business each year, and about one out of two will make it. The average entrepreneur is often on his or her third startup.

The dumb-manager theory of business problems just didn't hold water for me. There had to be a deeper reason why smart people would make decisions that lead to failure.

Being a professional musician doesn't mean you spend 12 hours a day playing music. It means you spend up to 12 hours a day taking care of business, dealing with litigation, with the various characters who've stolen your interests, or fending off hostile lawsuits from former members of the band.

Money, while clearly helpful in solving myriad problems, can often conceal a business's real flaws. It can also risk rigidifying a company's business model at the very moment it should be in 'customer discovery' mode or iterating around market opportunities.

If General Motors can't survive and run their business like a business, let them go under.

The insurance companies hate the idea of being sued in court like the devil hates holy water.

When you are just starting out with an online business, there's a good chance that you'll be making several mistakes. Because of the mistakes that can be made with starting an online business, many people decide to quit or think that online businesses are just a scam.

I hear Raleigh's new accounting business isn't doing well. Maybe up in New York or somewhere it's a good thing, but in Jackson, Mississippi, people just don't care to do business with a rude, condescending asshole.

A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

The real magic in National Geographic isn't how much money they have left at the end of the year. It's the fact that through their overall focus they are reaching hundreds of millions of people and educating people about the world. It just happens to be done in a business-oriented kind of way that is more sustainable.

A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is. And lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you'll go out of business.

As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.

On one level, going bust didn't bother me. It was the 80s, and there wasn't the stigma about bankruptcy that you might think. My mates weren't bothered. My dad was in business.. he knew that it happened, too. He loaned me the money to bail me out, and I got a loan from the bank to pay him back.

In the old days, if a neighbors apples fell into your yard, you worked it out over the back fence or picked them up and made pies. Today, you sue.

We don’t have business problems we have people problems. When we take care of our people problems, most of our business problems are automatically resolved

If you have a business model that relies on customers being misinformed, you better start working on changing your business model.