Paul Graham

Paul Graham

For Paul Graham the photographer, see Paul Graham (photographer).

For Paul Graham the genealogist, see Paul K. Graham.

Paul Graham (b. 1964) is a Lisp programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist. He is the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004).

In 1995 Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb, the first application service provider. Viaweb's software (written largely in Common Lisp) let users make their own Internet stores. In the summer of 1998 Viaweb was sold to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at $49.6 million. [1] At Yahoo! the product became Yahoo! Store.

He has since begun writing essays for his popular website paulgraham.com. They range from "Beating the Averages", which compares Lisp to other programming languages, to "Why Nerds are Unpopular", a discussion of nerd life in high school. A collection of his essays has been published as Hackers and Painters (ISBN 0-596-00662-4) by O'Reilly.

He is also working on Arc, a new Lisp dialect. It is discussed in his essay The Hundred-Year Language, among others. As part of his work on Arc, he began developing an email client and decided it needed a good spam filter. The simplified naive Bayes classifier he described in "A Plan for Spam" inspired the current generation of probabilistic spam filters.

In 2005, after giving a talk at the Harvard Computer Society later published as How to Start a Startup, Graham along with Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris started Y Combinator to provide seed funding to startups, particularly those started by younger, more technically-oriented founders. Y Combinator has now invested in 38 startups, the best known of which are probably reddit, Justin.tv and loopt.

Graham has an B.A. in philosophy^[1] from Cornell. He also earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Applied Sciences, (specializing in computer science) from Harvard in 1988 and 1990 respectively [2], and studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.