#277 Paul Graham's Essays Part 3

What I learned from reading Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age by Paul Graham  ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- [4:00] How To Make Wealth by Paul Graham  [4:01] Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.[6:00] All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. [7:00] It turns out, though, that there are economies of scale in how much of your life you devote to your work. In the right kind of business, someone who really devoted himself to work could generate ten or even a hundred times as much wealth as an average employee. [8:00] And the people you work with had better be good, because it's their work that yours is going to be averaged with. [9:00] In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz.  (Founders #208) [10:00] A very able person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers. [10:00] Paul Graham’s Essays (Founders #275) [11:00] What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. [12:00] Sam Walton got rich not by being a retailer, but by designing a new kind of store. [12:00] Sam Walton epiosdes #150 Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man by Vance H. Trimble. #234 Sam Walton: Made In America by Sam Walton. [13:00] Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a lit