Paul Graham's essays are the closest thing startup founders have to a canon. YC still emails "How to Start a Startup" to every batch; "Do Things That Don't Scale" and "Founder Mode" get quoted in board meetings. But his site lists them in one long undated column, which is great for him and hard for you. So here's the whole archive - all 229 of them - sorted by theme, with the ten essential ones up top.

Start here: 10 essential Paul Graham essays

If you've never read him, or want a re-entry point, these are the most commonly recommended - the ones founders quote back years later.

How to read Paul Graham

• Founders, start with Startups & Fundraising. "How to Start a Startup," "Do Things That Don't Scale," and "How to Get Startup Ideas" are the core three.
• Anyone building anything: "How to Do Great Work." It's long, but it's the distillation of everything else.
• Writers: the Writing & Thinking set. "Write Simply," "The Age of the Essay," and "Write Like You Talk" will change how you draft.
• They're short by design. Most take a few minutes and are plain HTML - readable on anything, and they age well.

The complete archive (229 essays)

Every essay Paul Graham has published, grouped by theme and linked straight to his site. His own site lists them newest-first with no categories; this splits all 229 by topic. Use the jump links or Ctrl/Cmd+F.

Latest essays (his newest, top of the list)

Paul Graham publishes a handful of new essays a year. These are his most recent, straight from the top of his site:

• How to Earn a Billion Dollars
• How to Convert Between Wealth and Income Tax
• The Brand Age
• The Shape of the Essay Field
• Good Writing
• What to Do
• The Origins of Wokeness
• Writes and Write-Nots
• When To Do What You Love
• Founder Mode
• The Right Kind of Stubborn
• The Reddits

Startups & Fundraising (74)

• A Fundraising Survival Guide
• A Local Revolution?
• A New Venture Animal
• A Student's Guide to Startups
• A Unified Theory of VC Suckage
• A Word to the Resourceful
• Apple's Mistake
• Before the Startup
• Black Swan Farming
• Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.
• Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?
• Do Things that Don't Scale
• Don't Talk to Corp Dev
• Five Founders
• Founder Control
• Founder Mode
• Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
• High Resolution Fundraising
• How to Be an Angel Investor
• How to Be Silicon Valley
• How to Convince Investors
• How to Earn a Billion Dollars
• How to Fund a Startup
• How to Get Startup Ideas
• How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
• How to Present to Investors
• How to Raise Money
• How to Start a Startup
• How to Start Google
• How Y Combinator Started
• Ideas for Startups
• Investor Herd Dynamics
• Jessica Livingston
• Learning from Founders
• Made in USA
• Ramen Profitable
• Relentlessly Resourceful
• Schlep Blindness
• Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
• Startup = Growth
• Startup Investing Trends
• Startups in 13 Sentences
• Subject: Airbnb
• Tablets
• The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
• The Airbnbs
• The Equity Equation
• The Fatal Pinch
• The Founder Visa
• The Future of Startup Funding
• The Future of Web Startups
• The Hacker's Guide to Investors
• The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
• The Hardware Renaissance
• The New Funding Landscape
• The Patent Pledge
• The Reddits
• The Risk of Discovery
• The Venture Capital Squeeze
• What Happened to Yahoo
• What I've Learned from Hacker News
• What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley
• What Startups Are Really Like
• What We Look for in Founders
• Where to See Silicon Valley
• Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
• Why Startup Hubs Work
• Why Startups Condense in America
• Why There Aren't More Googles
• Why to Move to a Startup Hub
• Why to not Not Start a Startup
• Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
• Why Twitter is a Big Deal
• Why YC

Ideas, Work & Ambition (28)

• A Project of One's Own
• Being a Noob
• Beyond Smart
• Crazy New Ideas
• Early Work
• Fierce Nerds
• Good and Bad Procrastination
• Holding a Program in One's Head
• How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
• How to Do Great Work
• How to Do What You Love
• How to Get New Ideas
• How to Work Hard
• How You Know
• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
• Organic Startup Ideas
• Superlinear Returns
• The Anatomy of Determination
• The Best Essay
• The Right Kind of Stubborn
• The Top Idea in Your Mind
• The Top of My Todo List
• What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
• What I Worked On
• What I've Learned from Users
• What to Do
• What You (Want to) Want
• When To Do What You Love

Writing & Thinking (21)

• Good Writing
• Heresy
• How to Disagree
• How to Do Philosophy
• How to Think for Yourself
• How to Write Usefully
• Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?
• Novelty and Heresy
• Persuade xor Discover
• Post-Medium Publishing
• Putting Ideas into Words
• The Age of the Essay
• The List of N Things
• The Need to Read
• The Shape of the Essay Field
• What You Can't Say
• Write Like You Talk
• Write Simply
• Writes and Write-Nots
• Writing and Speaking
• Writing, Briefly

Wealth, Money & Inequality (11)

• After the Ladder
• An Alternative Theory of Unions
• Defining Property
• Economic Inequality
• How People Get Rich Now
• How to Convert Between Wealth and Income Tax
• Inequality and Risk
• Modeling a Wealth Tax
• The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company
• The Refragmentation
• What I Did this Summer

Life, Society & Big Ideas (62)

• A Version 1.0
• A Way to Detect Bias
• After Credentials
• Alien Truth
• An NFT That Saves Lives
• Are Software Patents Evil?
• Be Good
• Billionaires Build
• Bradley's Ghost
• Change Your Name
• Charisma / Power
• Cities and Ambition
• Copy What You Like
• Coronavirus and Credibility
• Default Alive or Default Dead?
• Disconnecting Distraction
• Donate Unrestricted
• Earnestness
• Fashionable Problems
• General and Surprising
• Haters
• Having Kids
• How Art Can Be Good
• How Not to Die
• How to Lose Time and Money
• Is It Worth Being Wise?
• It's Charisma, Stupid
• Keep Your Identity Small
• Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
• Lies We Tell Kids
• Life is Short
• Mean People Fail
• News from the Front
• Orthodox Privilege
• See Randomness
• Six Principles for Making New Things
• Some Heroes
• Stuff
• The Acceleration of Addictiveness
• The Brand Age
• The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
• The Four Quadrants of Conformism
• The High-Res Society
• The Island Test
• The Lesson to Unlearn
• The Origins of Wokeness
• The Other Half of "Artists Ship"
• The Power of the Marginal
• The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty
• The Ronco Principle
• The Submarine
• The Trouble with the Segway
• The Two Kinds of Moderate
• Trolls
• Two Kinds of Judgement
• Undergraduation
• What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
• What the Bubble Got Right
• What You'll Wish You'd Known
• Why Nerds are Unpopular
• Why TV Lost
• You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

Programming, Lisp & Hackers (33)

• A Plan for Spam
• Beating the Averages
• Being Popular
• Better Bayesian Filtering
• Design and Research
• Filters that Fight Back
• Five Questions about Language Design
• Great Hackers
• Hackers and Painters
• Hiring is Obsolete
• How to Make Wealth
• If Lisp is So Great
• Java's Cover
• Lisp for Web-Based Applications
• Microsoft is Dead
• Mind the Gap
• Programming Bottom-Up
• Return of the Mac
• Revenge of the Nerds
• Succinctness is Power
• Taste for Makers
• The Hundred-Year Language
• The Other Road Ahead
• The Python Paradox
• The Roots of Lisp
• The Word Hacker
• Web 2.0
• Weird Languages
• What Business Can Learn from Open Source
• What Languages Fix
• What Made Lisp Different
• Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented
• Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas

Frequently asked questions

How many essays has Paul Graham written?
He has published 229+ essays on paulgraham.com since 1998, with new ones added a few times a year. This archive lists all of the ones currently on his site.

What's the best Paul Graham essay to start with?
For founders, "How to Start a Startup" and "Do Things That Don't Scale." For anyone, "How to Do Great Work." See the "Start here" list above.

Where can I read them?
Every essay here links directly to the original on paulgraham.com - free, plain HTML, no paywall. You can also download the full list as a CSV.

Are the essays organized in any order on his site?
On paulgraham.com they're in one reverse-chronological column with no categories. This archive groups all 229 by theme so you can browse by what you care about.

How often does Paul Graham publish new essays?
A handful a year - he is not prolific by volume, but the essays are dense and tend to circulate widely when they land. His newest are listed in the "Latest essays" section above.

Which essays are about fundraising?
See the Startups & Fundraising section - "How to Raise Money," "How to Convince Investors," "A Fundraising Survival Guide," and "The Equity Equation," among others.

Source: essay titles and links compiled from paulgraham.com/articles.html. "Start here" picks reflect essays widely recommended by YC and the founder community, not a personal ranking.

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