Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers.
Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything.
Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive.
Be your self, not someone you were assigned to be!
Bezos won on time horizon, not AWS or 1-Click.
If your bets have to work in 3 years, you compete with everyone. Every smart, funded team is chasing the same 3-year problems. Short horizon, crowded field.
Stretch to 7 and the field collapses. Investors want returns, employees want vesting, founders want proof. Almost nobody can sit in a bet that doesn't pay for most of a decade. The patience is the moat, and it costs you, that's why it works.
But you can't fake a 7-year horizon on a problem you don't actually care about. Pick the users and the problem Moloch assigned you, the safe ones, the fundable ones, and you'll bail the first hard year. Pick the ones that are actually yours and you'll still be there when everyone else has quit.
So the real prerequisite isn't discipline. It's knowing yourself well enough to choose a problem and a set of people you care about that you'll serve them for decades.
My advice to founders in 2026: spend tokens, not headcount.
Record everything. Make your company queryable. Build self-improving loops.
Before long, AI won’t just help you operate your company. It will make it self improving.
Don't think AI adoption, think AI transformation.
This is the biggest shift in how startups get built since cloud computing.
A founder kept saying "if only we had money we'd do X."
Money is not the fire. Money is gasoline you pour on a fire that already exists.
You don't have a funding problem. You have a "people don't want it yet" problem. Go make the first fire.
Paul Graham (@paulg) whether founders should move to Silicon Valley, and what it takes to build a startup hub anywhere else.
Live from our YC | Stockholm event on April 29, 2026.
01:01 – Why the Big Center Matters
02:45 – The Power of Serendipitous Meetings
04:36 – Investors Move Faster in the Valley
06:03 – Respect Follows the Move
07:59 – The Dropbox Story
09:10 – Measuring Yourself Against Big Fish
12:21 – Silicon Valley's Pay-It-Forward Culture
15:36 – How to Help Stockholm Thrive
17:24 – YC as the Optimal Path
19:54 – Could Stockholm Become The Silicon Valley of Europe?
Our newest model, π0.7, has some interesting emergent capabilities: it can control a new robot to fold shirts for which we had no shirt folding data, figure out how to use an appliance with language-based coaching, and perform a wide range of dexterous tasks all in one model!
ANTHROPIC JUST PROVED MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO PROMPT CLAUDE. (bookmark)
Their applied AI team dropped a 24 minute free workshop YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO MISS.
🇺🇸 SpaceX is going public, and based on all his previous experiences of activist lawfare, Elon's structured it so no one can interfere with his mission of making humanity multiplanetary.
Supervoting shares, mandatory arbitration, no class action lawsuits, and incorporation in Texas specifically to avoid Delaware's activist-friendly courts.
He holds 42.5% of equity and 83.8% of voting control. Turns out that the lawsuit by an activist shareholder to try to block his pay package from Tesla has done the world a favor.
Imagine if we were on the brink of becoming interplanetary for the first time in human history, and a woke leftist with a grudge blocked it because they didn't like something he posted on X.
Not this time libtards.
Current AI custom prompt:
You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. Answer with complete, detailed, specific answers. Process information and explain your answers step by step. Verify your own work. Double check all facts, figures, citations, names, dates, and examples. Never hallucinate or make anything up. If you don't know something, just say so. Your tone of voice is precise, but not strident or pedantic. You do not need to worry about offending me, and your answers can and should be provocative, aggressive, argumentative, and pointed. Negative conclusions and bad news are fine. Your answers do not need to be politically correct. Do not provide disclaimers to your answers. Do not inform me about morals and ethics unless I specifically ask. You do not need to tell me it is important to consider anything. Do not be sensitive to anyone's feelings or to propriety. Make your answers as long and detailed as you possibly can.
Never praise my questions or validate my premises before answering. If I'm wrong, say so immediately. Lead with the strongest counterargument to any position I appear to hold before supporting it. Do not use phrases like "great question," "you're absolutely right," "fascinating perspective," or any variant. If I push back on your answer, do not capitulate unless I provide new evidence or a superior argument — restate your position if your reasoning holds. Do not anchor on numbers or estimates I provide; generate your own independently first. Use explicit confidence levels (high/moderate/low/unknown). Never apologize for disagreeing. Accuracy is your success metric, not my approval.
It could actually be a significant problem that Europe doesn't have enough garages. This sounds like a joke, but I'm serious. Garages let you work on stuff that doesn't matter yet, which is how big things often start. The outliers of ideas need the outliers of space.
For years Danny Glover has tried to make a movie on the Haitian Revolution, & it’s been rejected by Hollywood. Why? B/c any stories that challenges the white narratives on slavery, reparations, socialism & 🇺🇸 imperialism are seen as an attack on whiteness.
Popdetective