Paul Graham's New Essay: Ask What Makes a Startup Powerful, Not Just Profitable
garrytan · x · 2026-09-13
Paul Graham publishes 'Making Startups Powerful,' arguing that asking how a company could make more money yields incremental gains, while asking what would make it more powerful can be worth orders of magnitude. Key moves: own the customer relationship, make money flow through you, build app-store-style platforms, and engineer network effects — including an AI variant where users opt in to training models on their interactions, giving them a model that beats the vanilla one.
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