The Catalyst
Ideas with a spark, energy, range and the ability to start things.
Paul Graham fits The Catalyst because his defining contribution has been igniting movement in others rather than commanding institutions himself. By co-founding Y Combinator in 2005, he built a repeatable mechanism for turning unproven founders into funded companies, seeding firms such as Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox.
“Determination, it's hard to judge by looking at the person. The way you would judge determination, because people act determined. People think they're supposed to act determined. No one walks into their Y combinator interview thinking, I need to seem diffident. Nobody thinks that.”
“Near London only in the sense that everything in England is near everything else by American standards. It's not really that London was the center of ideas. There were a lot of smart people there, but things were more spread out. Be careful with English history there. Back to this idea, though, of how to get people to be more ambitious.”
“Maybe the reason I'm interested in medieval Europe is it's because where our world came from, right? Yes. The clocks we use, the writing system, all the clothes eventually evolved from that. So the reason I'm interested, I long ago realized That the medieval period wasn't a dip.”
“That's why I'm mauling over what actually goes on, because there is this skill there. The weird thing about YC interviews is in a sense they're a negotiation, right? And in a negotiation, you're always saying, oh, I'm not going to pay a lot for that. It's terrible. It's worthless, right? And yet.”
Bloomberg Tech: “From the Archives: Y Combinator Founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston on Studio 1.0 (2014)”
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