Programmer, essayist, entrepreneur, and investor.
1964–present · England and the United States
Install Paul's frameworks in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install paul-grahamInstalls 5 skills from Paul, plus the rest of summon.guide. Source on GitHub.
Paul Graham was born in Weymouth, Dorset, England, and grew up in the United States. He studied philosophy at Cornell University, then computer science at Harvard, where he earned a doctorate. He also studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Programming and painting remained parallel parts of his working life, and his later essays repeatedly returned to the shared problems of taste, craft, originality, and making.
In 1995 Graham and Robert Morris started Viaweb, software that let merchants build online stores in a browser and one of the earliest substantial web applications. Yahoo acquired the company in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store. Graham began publishing essays on paulgraham.com in 2001, writing about programming languages, startups, writing, taste, wealth, cities, education, and ambitious work. In 2005 he co-founded Y Combinator with Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell. YC combined small seed investments, a fixed batch, close office hours, and a public Demo Day, helping establish the modern accelerator model.
Graham's influence comes from the combination of operating experience and unusually durable writing. His startup essays gave founders compact tests such as making something people want, doing things that do not scale, and asking whether a company is default alive. His essays on maker schedules, independent thought, writing, taste, and great work widened that advice beyond startups. His official biography also lists the Lisp books On Lisp and ANSI Common Lisp, the essay collection Hackers & Painters, and Bel, a Lisp dialect written in itself.
Frameworks distilled from Paul’s life, packaged as Claude Code skills. Each skill is invoked with a slash command and grounded in the primary biographies listed under References.
/paul-graham:paul-grahamGet out of startup theater and back to users, product, maker time, and the smallest test that can teach you something real.
Source: Paul Graham's essays at paulgraham.com
/paul-graham:do-things-that-dont-scaleReplace abstract growth planning with manual recruiting, close observation, and an unusually attentive first-user experience.
Source: Do Things that Don't Scale by Paul Graham (2013), Manual user recruitment and the fragile early product
/paul-graham:default-aliveUse current cash, burn, and growth to determine whether the company reaches profitability before the bank balance reaches zero.
Source: Default Alive or Default Dead? by Paul Graham (2015)
/paul-graham:maker-scheduleCluster coordination and recover the uninterrupted blocks required to hold a large creative problem in your head.
Source: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham (2009)
/paul-graham:great-work-projectMove from vague ambition to a field, its frontier, an interesting gap, and one project that creates feedback this week.
Source: How to Do Great Work by Paul Graham (2023)
Install in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install paul-grahamBring Paul’s frameworks into your terminal. One install registers every guide’s skills.
Each Claude Code skill above is grounded in a specific passage of a specific book. These are the primary sources we drew from for Paul.
“Make something people want.”
“Do things that don't scale.”
“You can be smart without being very curious. But you can't do great work without being very curious.”
Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:
Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
Other guides
