Billionaires Build

Paul Graham's December 2020 essay built around a startling discovery: the two essays he'd been planning to write — how to ace your Y Combinator interview, and why the political claim that "the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people" is wrong — turned out to be the same essay. Drawing on his career as a Y Combinator partner picking future billionaires, Graham argues that what YC actually looks for is people who deeply understand a group of users and can build what they want. Aptitude for exploiting people is, if anything, the opposite of what predicts billion-dollar outcomes.