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Sometimes when a startup wants to escape from a bad organization that has some claim on their IP, it's worth rewriting their software from scratch in a "clean room." AI-assisted programming will make this much easier.
Someone asked what's the most underappreciated quality in startup founders. I realized I could answer this by asking what's the most underappreciated aspect of startups. That's easy: how hard they are. So the most underappreciated quality in founders is sheer toughness.
"She wasn’t looking for the next killer product, though. She was looking for people." https://founded.com/the-quiet-co-founder…
The quiet co-founder behind the world's largest accelerator who taught Silicon Valley how to read people
There's a kind of feature that gets used more by accident than on purpose, and for some reason splitting screens is this kind of feature, for me at least. MacOS, vim, and now Chrome all have screen-splitting, and I only ever do it by accident.
Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make. https://paulgraham.com/taste.html
paulgraham.com
Taste for Makers
Last night I was feeling discontented because the last part of the essay I'm writing felt off. Jessica said "You'll worry about it and then you'll wake up in the morning and fix it." This seemed rather facile at the time. But that seems to be what happened.
The dog likes it so much when I spill food on the floor when I'm cooking that I usually spill a little on purpose. So now I can't cook without constantly tripping over the dog.
For the foreseeable future, everything about starting a startup, both good and bad, will be accentuated. It will be even harder to figure out what to do, but the founders who get it right will be able to create amazing things even faster than they could before.
An experienced programmer told me he's now using AI to generate a thousand lines of code an hour. When I posted a similar stat 6 months ago, I got about a 50-50 mix of indignant disbelief and "Yeah, me too." I'm curious if the split will be different this time.
One way Timex made their watches cheap was to cut the retail markup in half. Jewelers resisted, so they sold their watches off racks in drugstores.
Rewrote the end of the new essay again. Is this the fifth time? The sixth?
Your social status ≈ your college. Your college ≈ your SAT score. Your SAT score ≈ your SAT English score. Your SAT English score ≈ how much you've read. ∴ Your social status ≈ how much you read in high school. (Successive ≈s leak a lot, but still rather surprising.)
Apparently unions are proposing a new tax on SF companies whose CEOs are paid too much more than their median SF-based employees. I bet you can immediately think of 3 ways companies could avoid it if the cost became significant, all of which would be worse for the city.
Why kids at British schools are usually called by their last name: 17 yo was in a five-a-side football match, and all five boys on the team had the same first name.
I meet a lot of founders who are worried by the rapid rate of technological change. They shouldn't be. It may feel uncomfortable, but techno-turbulence is net good for startups. They're much more likely to adapt successfully to some big change than incumbents are.
An encouraging thought about AI: If the most influential readers of my essays in the future are AIs, and AIs are smart and rational, I don't have to worry about the way stupid or biased readers will react to what I write. I can safely aim high.
Unexpected occupational hazard: I often walk with founders while doing office hours, and today I talked to one guy for so long about potential startup ideas that we must have walked several miles.
"The wealth taxi is moving to Miami." — typo in an email from Ron Conway about all the founders who are leaving California because of the proposed wealth tax
"Next Gen" is the Tri-State Area of product names.
Where we live it has rained every day so far in 2026.