The Start-up Guru: Y Combinator’s Paul Graham

Long Inc. article on Graham, whose, as Jason Kottke says, “essays you either love to hate or hate to love.”

Graham is 44 years old and possesses the combination, often encountered in entrepreneurs, of extreme intelligence and a hint of arrogance. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science and has several years of formal training as a visual artist. Before starting Y Combinator, he founded Viaweb, a dot-com software company that helped retailers sell online; it was acquired by Yahoo in 1998 for $49 million. After leaving Yahoo, Graham won renown as an essayist, the creator of a new programming language, and the guy who invented spam filtering as we know it. Today, he funds more start-ups in a single year than a typical venture capitalist backs in a decade.