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February 8, 2026

Do things that don't scale.

— Paul Graham

Paul Graham (born 1964) is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist who co-founded Y Combinator, the most successful startup accelerator in history. Y Combinator has funded over 4,000 companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Reddit, and DoorDash, with a combined valuation exceeding $600 billion. Before Y Combinator, Graham created Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, which Yahoo acquired in 1998. As an essayist, his writings on startups, technology, and entrepreneurship have influenced a generation of founders. Graham's counterintuitive advice often challenges conventional business wisdom, particularly his emphasis on doing intensive manual work early rather than building scalable systems prematurely. He observed that successful startups typically launch by serving customers in highly personalized, labor-intensive ways that couldn't possibly work at scale, then gradually figure out how to automate what they learned works.

SUCCESS AND LEADERSHIP STARTUP WISDOM CUSTOMER FOCUS

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Context

Graham wrote this after watching hundreds of startups fail by optimizing for scale before understanding what customers actually wanted. He noticed a pattern: founders would avoid manual, time-consuming work because it seemed inefficient, building automated systems and scalable processes while still figuring out their product. Meanwhile, the most successful startups did the opposite. Airbnb's founders personally photographed host properties with professional cameras. Stripe's founders manually onboarded every early customer and handled their payment processing by hand. Wufoo's founders sent handwritten thank-you notes to every new user. These approaches couldn't scale to millions of users, but they weren't meant to. They created intimate understanding of customer needs and desires that informed what to build. Graham recognized that premature scaling optimizes for an imaginary future while doing unscalable things optimizes for present reality. You can't automate what you don't understand, and you can't understand customers from a distance. The unscalable intensive early effort teaches you what matters, which then informs what's worth scaling later.

Today's Mantra

I do the manual work that teaches me what truly matters.

Reflection Question

What manual, intensive work are you avoiding because it seems inefficient, even though it would give you invaluable insight into what your customers actually need? Are you building systems before understanding what's worth systematizing?

Application Tip

Apply Graham's principle this week by identifying one area where you've been trying to scale or automate prematurely. Choose to do intensely manual, personalized work with your next five customers or clients instead. If you're building a product, personally onboard users and watch them use it. If you're providing a service, over-deliver with hands-on attention that couldn't possibly work at scale. If you're creating content, have individual conversations with readers rather than broadcasting to everyone. Document what you learn from this intensive engagement. Graham's insight is that you can't automate your way to understanding, you have to earn it through direct, often inefficient, human contact. The goal isn't to do things manually forever but to learn what's actually valuable before you systematize. Most founders fail because they build scalable systems for things nobody wants. The successful ones do painstaking manual work early that reveals what's worth scaling later. Track what changes when you stop optimizing for efficiency and start optimizing for learning through direct engagement.

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