locked that in. At that point you would think someone would be thinking,
“Wow, this is great. I’m rich. I can go buy everything I want.” But all I was
thinking was, “Thank God we didn’t fail.”
Livingston: You write a lot of essays with advice for startup founders. What is
the most important piece of advice?
Graham: What Y Combinator prints on our T-shirts: make something people
want. If you make something users want, they will be happy, and you can translate
that happiness into money. That is the basis of a startup. A startup is a company
that builds some kind of technology that people want. The mistake that a
lot of founders make is to build something they think users want, but that users
don’t actually want.
Livingston: Do you think having done a startup yourself makes you a better
judge of startup founders now that you are an investor?
Paul Graham 221
Graham: Oh yeah. In fact, I don’t know how people who haven’t done it can
pick founders. How can they tell? I often see people who seem kind of clueless,
and I can remember, “Yeah, we seemed clueless in exactly the same way.” So
those are the guys we invest in.

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• locked that in.