Paul Graham co-founded Y Combinator in 2005, which has since produced Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Coinbase, DoorDash, and hundreds of other companies representing over $600B in combined value. Before YC, he founded Viaweb, one of the first web-based application companies, which sold to Yahoo in 1998. His essays — covering founder psychology, startup philosophy, the nature of wealth creation, and the mechanics of early-stage company building — have become the foundational intellectual canon of Silicon Valley. More than almost any other single person, Graham defined what it means to think like a startup founder, and his writing continues to shape how thousands of new founders approach building from zero.

For founders in the earliest stages of company formation and for investors trying to understand the mindset and decision-making patterns of the strongest early-stage founders, Paul Graham's essays are the closest thing to a primary source on what actually distinguishes startups that work from those that don't. His frameworks on doing things that don't scale, the importance of talking to users, the psychology of founder motivation, and how to navigate the discomfort of early uncertainty have been stress-tested across thousands of companies over two decades. For anyone building or funding companies at the pre-seed or seed stage, his body of work is the most important single reading list available.