Paul Graham

Paul Graham (born 1964) sold his startup Viaweb to Yahoo in 1998, then reshaped how technology companies get built: his essays became the founding literature of startup culture, and Y Combinator — which he co-founded in 2005 with Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell — became the world’s most influential accelerator, hatching Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whom Graham picked as his successor at YC.

Writes and write-nots

Graham’s stake in AI is structural — recent YC batches have been dominated by AI startups, and he has marveled publicly at founders coding with LLMs — but his most-discussed contribution to the debate is the October 2024 essay “Writes and Write-Nots.” Its prediction: because writing is hard and AI has made it optional, most people will stop learning to do it. Like physical strength after industrialization, clear writing will persist only in those who choose to train it.

The essay is notable for what it does not say: Graham proposes no ban, no lament, no rollback — he treats AI’s takeover of routine writing as settled fact and simply maps the consequences, closing that he knows which half of the divide he wants to be in. Critics, including many writers, read the piece as fatalism from a man whose fund profits from the disruption; admirers read it as the rare AI take that is neither hype nor panic.