A Habit of Building

This comes near the start of Paul Graham’s August 2026 essay “How Universities Should Prepare Founders” (paulgraham.com/prepare.html). Graham co-founded Y Combinator (YC), which funds startups. He argues that YC knows what universities should aim for, because it gets their students next, like a grad school, and has had 20 years to refine its model of a promising founder. The quote is that model. His reason for it: “The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it.”

Graham means building “in a very broad sense.” The product knowledge comes from studying subjects like computer science, mechanical engineering, or molecular biology, “not management or finance,” but founders don’t all have to study engineering: “Almost any kind of expertise that could be described as building or creating could be useful.” His example is Steve Jobs, whose study of calligraphy Graham counts among the reasons Apple dominated desktop publishing (designing printed pages, typefaces included, on a personal computer).

The habit matters, Graham argues later in the essay, because a startup is itself a project, so starting one feels natural to someone used to working on projects of their own: “It won’t seem weird that there’s no teacher or boss telling them what to do.” He adds that random side projects are where the best startup ideas come from. Those ideas look so implausible at first that anyone consciously hunting for startup ideas would reject them, so the way to find one is to work on whatever projects seem interesting.

In 2006, in “A Student’s Guide to Startups,” an essay drawn from a talk at MIT, he put it more strongly: “Above all else, above academic credentials and even the idea you apply with, we look for people who build things.”