Paul Graham is a computer scientist, 🏷️#entrepreneur, 🏷️#venture-capitalist, 🏷️#author, and essayist best known for co-founding the startup accelerator 📝Y Combinator and for his prolific essays on startups, programming, and intellectual life published at paulgraham.com. His early career centered on the Lisp programming language and his startup Viaweb — one of the first browser-based applications — which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998 and rebranded Yahoo Store.
Graham co-founded Y Combinator in 2005 with Jessica Livingston (his eventual wife), Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell, and the firm went on to fund Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, and many other prominent startups. He also founded 📝Hacker News as a community discussion forum for the YC ecosystem. His programming books include On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). Technology journalist Steven Levy has described him as a "hacker philosopher."