The Best Lessons From Paul Graham

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By Edoardo Moreni - February, 21st 2014

Paul Graham is probably one of those people who have a background, which means and doesn’t anything to what they are doing and the path they have taken in their lives. He’s currently a partner and co-founder at YCombinator, probably the best and most connected accelerator in the world. In the past, Paul Graham got a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Cornell University, then attended Harvard University, earning Master of Science (1988) and Doctor of Philosophy (1990) degrees in Applied Sciences with a specialization in computer science. Further he has also studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

In 1996, he founded Viaweb, the first application provider, which allowed users to make their own internet stores. Viaweb was later acquired by Yahoo in stocks at a valuation of $49.6M and it became Yahoo! Store. He has been writing several different essays in the past years, which have been published both on his website and on other printed publications, such as “Hackers & Painters” By O’Reilly.

In 2005, Graham founded YCombinator, which has now invested in more than 400 startups in 30 distinct markets, including Dropbox, Stripe and Airbnb. Paul Graham is also well known for his Lisp skills and the books he published On Lisp (1993) and ANSI Common Lisp (1995). In 2002, Graham discovered a simple spam filtering algorithm, which he published in an essay entitled “A Plan for Spam” advocating the use of a Naive Bayes classifier to identify spam, that inspired the current generations of filters.

He was also included in BusinessWeek’s list of “The 25 Most Influential People on the Web” in 2008.