In the era of AI, you should be more familiar with: 13 maxims from Paul Graham, the father of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, for entrepreneurs.

The two founders Wei combined their experiences and the current environment to analyze, one by one, the well-known 13 startup principles of YC founder Paul Graham, focusing on providing insights for entrepreneurs in the AI era. This article is derived from Paul Graham’s “Startups in 13 Sentences,” organized, translated, and written by Deep Tide TechFlow. (Background: When browsers become the next battlefield for AI, who will be eliminated?) (Additional context: Trump imposed 100% tariffs on semiconductors, TSMC invests $200 billion to “dodge a bullet,” opening with a 5% pump.) Paul Graham’s “Startups in 13 Sentences” is widely known and is essentially a must-read for entrepreneurs. “The success or failure of a startup almost entirely depends on the founding team.” “Real work only begins after the product is launched. Launching a product helps you understand what you should be doing. Before that, you’re just wasting time.” “Understanding users is the core. The essence of entrepreneurship is ‘creating value’: the most controllable dimension of value is the degree to which the product improves users’ lives. The hardest part is knowing what to do for the users. Once the direction is clear, making the product is just a matter of effort, and most excellent developers can do it.” Although published in 2009, its core viewpoints remain relevant today and are an article that founders can reread every year. The two entrepreneurs Chris Saad and Yaniv Bernstein analyzed Paul Graham’s 13 startup principles through a dialogue format, combining their startup experiences and the current entrepreneurial environment. “A successful startup is essentially an anti-intuitive exploration.” 01 Choose the right co-founder; early investment is investing in the founder. Yaniv: Paul Graham wrote in the article, “The importance of co-founders to a startup is comparable to the impact of location on real estate; any property attribute can be changed, but the location cannot; startup ideas can be easily adjusted, but changing co-founders is as difficult as climbing to the sky. The success or failure of a startup almost entirely depends on the founding team.” In Australia, you can indeed “move a house” by transporting the entire building with a truck, but the process is really messy, and no one wants to reach that point. Let’s discuss the meaning of this principle. Chris: I just talked about this topic with an investor. I believe that the essence of early investment is investing in the founders. If you want to start a business, the first and most important decision is choosing who will be your co-founder. There’s a saying in the film industry: “Half of a director’s job is casting,” and entrepreneurship is the same; the core of managing a startup is selecting the right team members. “People are the most important asset” may sound clichéd, but it is absolutely true, especially in the field of entrepreneurship: the impact of entrepreneurship is amplified, and the process is filled with challenges, whether it’s emotional pressure, tactical dilemmas, or strategic choices. You need truly excellent partners: aligned goals, resilience, focus, and commitment. The success or failure of a startup in its early (or even later) stages often depends on who your “comrades-in-arms” are. Yaniv: Absolutely right. There is a consensus that “investors invest in the founding team,” and for founders, the corresponding “investment” is finding the right co-founder. However, from my own experience, I found that founders are not isolated individuals; you can’t say, “Founder A is excellent, and Founder B is also excellent, so this is a good team.” The team is a “non-linear system”: a good team is worth far more than the sum of its individual members, and the opposite is true for a bad team. So when choosing a co-founder, consider “relative compatibility”: are skills complementary? Are core goals aligned? Can indivisible resources, like decision-making power and profits, be shared? More importantly, can your relationship endure? Can you work together under pressure? There will always be setbacks in entrepreneurship; when the situation becomes difficult, will your co-founder stand by your side? Can your relationship withstand it, or will it completely break apart? Statistics can also prove: founder breakups are a common reason for startup failures. Anyone familiar with the startup scene knows this kind of breakup is too common; most startups lose a founder midway. If you can build a resilient, cohesive team with complementary skills, where each individual looks outstanding on their own and even more impressive as a team, then you have absolute advantage. To me, this is the true meaning of “choosing the right co-founder.” Chris: I believe most startup failures ultimately boil down to founder issues. Paul said, “Ideas are easy to change, but changing founders is hard,” and that’s very true. 02 Quick startup; everything before product launch is wasting time. Yaniv: Paul Graham wrote, “The essence of rapid startup is not to push the product to market as soon as possible, but rather ‘real work only begins after the product is launched.’ Launching a product helps you understand ‘what you should be doing’; before that, you’re wasting time. So regardless of what the product is, the core value lies in allowing you to reach users.” Chris: We’ve talked many times about “Minimum Viable Product (MVP)” and “Minimum Viable Iteration”; the core is “release-learn-iterate.” There’s a famous saying: “Everyone can follow the plan until they take the first punch (encounter reality).” I often say, “Before a product interacts with real users, all efforts are just theoretical.” What Paul wants to express is: rapid startup is not just about creating value early and seizing advantages; more importantly, it’s about understanding how users use your product, whether anyone cares, and whether it can create real value. If not, why? How should it be adjusted? What have you learned? The faster you launch the product and iterate, the faster you grow. Yaniv: Chris, I am currently preparing for “seed round fundraising” and had some tough conversations with investors before recording the podcast. They always ask, “I still can’t figure out what your product is” and “You need to show me the roadmap.” This is unreasonable because, in early fundraising, the truth is, “I am not even sure what the final product will be; I need to release a version first, see the market response, and then continue to iterate.” Investors should be asking: “How do you quickly push to market? How do you quickly iterate?” Fortunately, several excellent investors have already joined our “Violet Project”; they only ask one question: “How do you plan to push to market quickly?” These investors understand the logic of Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurship, and Paul can always articulate this point; it is no coincidence he is called the “Godfather of Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship.” The core principle of Silicon Valley is: let go of the “false sense of precision” and “control urge”; don’t think that “as long as you think it through, do enough research, and build enough models in Excel, you can control everything.” You have to “bow to reality”: the sea is stronger than you; you must go with the flow. Jump into the water and see where the current takes you, rather than pretending you can control everything. There is indeed a profound truth in this. Chris: Many people come from academia, agencies (used to “one-off large results”), or large companies that use “waterfall development” (which require “getting it right the first time,” or you might get fired); some have just graduated (writing a paper only has one submission opportunity and must be perfect). They are used to “one-off efforts,” but entrepreneurship requires "release-learn-…