Entrepreneurship

Making Startups Powerful

Paul Graham argues that the most productive question a founder can ask is not how to make more money but how to make the company more powerful. The essay works through several structural moves—owning the customer relationship, enabling app-store-like extensibility, introducing network effects, going full-stack, getting customers earlier, and getting data earlier—that each tend to produce power disproportionate to the effort they require.

Essay · Startups · Strategy · Open Source · Entrepreneurship