If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student. – Paul Graham
Its hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasnt yet been duplicated by technology. – Paul Graham
Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design – designing too early what a program should do. – Paul Graham
It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits. – Lewis Thomas