Paul Graham is an English-born computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author, and essayist. He is best known for Lisp, his former startup Viaweb, co-founding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his blog, and Hacker News.
Early life and education
Paul Graham was born on November 13, 1964, and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he attended Gateway High School.
In 1986, Graham graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Cornell University. He obtained a Master of Science from Harvard University in 1988, and in 1990, Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Computer Science. Graham also studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.
Career
Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb in 1996, the first application service provider (ASP). Written mostly in Common Lisp, Viaweb’s software, allowed users to make their own Internet stores. Viaweb was sold to Yahoo! in the summer of 1998, for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at $49.6 million. The product became Yahoo! Store after the acquisition.
Graham later reached publicity for his essays, which he posts to his website paulgraham.com. Essay topics vary from Beating the Averages, which resembles Lisp to other programming languages and presented the theoretical programming language Blub, to Why Nerds are Unpopular, a discussion of nerd life in high school. O’Reilly issued a compilation of Graham’s essays which involves what Graham understands to be the advantages of Lisp to program it and a conversation of the growth of Viaweb called Hackers & Painters.
Graham stated in 2001 that he was working on Arc, a new dialect of Lisp. Graham has written various essays explaining features or objects of the language, and some internal projects at Y Combinator have been written down in Arc, most notably the news aggregator program and the Hacker News web forum.
After delivering a speech at the Harvard Computer Society in 2005, Graham later published as How to Start a Startup. Graham along with Jessica Livingston, Robert Tappan Morris, and Trevor Blackwell co-founded the Y Combinator, to provide to a large number of startups for seed funding, particularly those started by younger, more technically oriented founders.
From 2005 – 2008, the Cambridge, Massachusetts held one program and another one in Mountain View, California. In 2009, Y Combinator declared that they would shut down the program in Cambridge and all the forthcoming programs would take place in Silicon Valley. Sequoia Capital ran the investment round in 2009 for $2 million into an entity of Y Combinator, which would permit the company to finance in approximately 60 companies a year as contradict to their previous 40 companies a year. Sequoia led a funding round the following year for Y Combinator with $8.25 million to further expand the number of startups the company could finance.
Then, in 2011, SV Angel and Yuri Milner contributed a $150,000 exchangeable note investment for every Y Combinator company. When Start Fund was renewed, each company received a revised settled amount of $80,000. Graham announced in September 2013 that the Y Combinator would finance nonprofit organizations allowed into its program after having examined the concept with Watsi while continuing to fund mostly for-profit startups. Founder Paul Graham declared in 2014 that he was stepping down and that Sam Altman would take over the position as Y Combinator’s President. That same year, Altman announced the new deal for the Y Combinator startups, which contributes $120,000 for 7% equity.
Sam Altman declared a partnership with Transcriptic in late in 2014, to provide expanded assistance for Y Combinator’s developing community of biotech companies. Then, in 2015, Altman declared a partnership with Bolt and extended support for hardware companies. The Y Combinator announced a closure of its $700 million growth fund in 2015, led by Ali Rowghani.
YC declared that partnerships will be attending 11 countries on August 11, 2016, his fall to engage with founders and learn further about how they can be helpful to international startup communities. These 11 countries are Argentina, Chile, Denmark, India, Israel, Germany, Mexico, Nigeria, Portugal, Russia, and Sweden. The Y Combinator declared shuffling the deck at the Mountain View startup accelerator again in September 2016, with Altman stating that he will now be president of YC Group, which involves Y Combinator, the YC Continuity capital that was begun last October and the YC Research’s moon shot program.
Y Combinator has now funded in 1450 startups, including Airbnb, Docker, DoorDash, Dropbox, Heroku, Justin.tv, Mixpanel, Optimizely, Reddit, Stripe, Xobni, and Zenefits. The combined valuation of Y Combinator companies was over $80B.
In 2008 publication of its annual feature, BusinessWeek included Paul Graham as the 25 Most Influential People on the Web. Paul Graham married Jessica Livingston in 2008. In late 2011, Graham announced in answer to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that no representatives of any company supporting it would be invited to Y Combinator’s Demo Day events.