保罗·格雷厄姆

保罗·格雷厄姆（英语：Paul Graham，1964年11月13日—），美国程序员、风险投资家、博客作者和技术作家。他以Lisp方面的工作而知名，也是最早的Web应用Viaweb的创办者之一，后来被雅虎以美金5千万余元收购，成为Yahoo! Store。共同创办了具有影响力的创业加速器和种子资本公司Y Combinator。

他是几本计算机编程书籍的作者，包括：《关于Lisp》、《ANSI通用Lisp》和《黑客与画家》等。科技记者史蒂文·列维曾将格雷厄姆描述为“黑客哲学家”。

格雷厄姆出生在英国，在那里他和他的家人拥有永久居住权。然而，他也是美国的公民，在那里他接受教育、生活和工作直到2016年。

生平

他出生于英格兰多塞特郡韦茅斯。1968年和家人一起搬到匹兹堡，1986年获得康奈尔大学的哲学学士学位，随后进入哈佛大学，1988年和1990年分别获得计算机科学方向的硕士和博士学位，并在罗德岛设计学院和佛罗伦萨绘画艺术学院学习过绘画。

天使投资

2005年他与人共同创建了创业投资公司Y Combinator，先后投资了数十家创业公司，包括reddit、Justin.tv等。公司的新闻网站Hacker News是访问量最高的技术新闻信息来源之一。

私人生活

2008年，他与Y Combinator的另一位创办者杰西卡·利文斯顿结婚。

散文

“反驳金字塔”来自保罗·格雷厄姆《如何反驳》（How to Disagree）一文（2008年3月）：

网络上也流传着不同的中文译本。

著作

《Hackers & Painters》（2004）（中译版《黑客与画家》）

《On Lisp》（1993）

《ANSI Common Lisp》（1995）

Paul Graham (born November 13, 1964) is an English-American computer scientist, writer, essayist, entrepreneur, and investor. His work includes the programming language Arc, the startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), co-founding the startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, a number of essays and books, and the media webpage Hacker News.

He is the author of the computer programming books On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp, and Hackers & Painters. Technology journalist Steven Levy has described Graham as a "hacker philosopher".

Graham was born in England, where he and his family have maintained a permanent residence since 2016. He is also a citizen of the United States, where he attended all of his schooling and lived for 48 years prior to returning to England.

Education and early life

Graham was born in Weymouth, Dorset, England. His father was from Pwllheli, Wales, and worked for Westinghouse (now CBS Corporation) designing nuclear reactors. Graham and his family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1968, where he later attended the Gateway High School. He began writing computer code in high school.

Graham received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in philosophy from Cornell University in 1986. He then received a Master of Science in 1988, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1990, both in computer science from Harvard University.

Graham also studied fine arts and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

Career

In 1996, Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb and recruited Trevor Blackwell shortly after. They believed that Viaweb was the first application service provider. Graham received a patent for webapps based on his work at Viaweb. Viaweb's software, written mostly in Common Lisp, allowed users to make their own Internet stores. In the summer of 1998, after Jerry Yang received a strong recommendation from Ali Partovi, Viaweb was sold to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at $49.6 million. After the acquisition, the product became Yahoo! Store.

Graham later gained notice for his essays, which he posts on his personal website. Essay subjects range from "Beating the Averages", which compares Lisp to other programming languages and introduced the hypothetical programming language Blub, to "Why Nerds are Unpopular", a discussion of nerd life in high school. A collection of his essays has been published as Hackers & Painters by O'Reilly Media, which includes a discussion of the growth of Viaweb and the advantages of Lisp to program it.

In 2001, Graham announced that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp named Arc. It was released on 29 January 2008. Over the years since, he has written several essays describing features or goals of the language, and some internal projects at Y Combinator have been written in Arc, including the Hacker News web forum and news aggregator program.

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 invested in more than 1300 startups, including Reddit, Twitch (formerly Justin.tv), Xobni, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Stripe.

BusinessWeek included Paul Graham in the 2008 edition of its annual feature, The 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

In response to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Graham announced in late 2011 that no representatives of any company supporting it would be invited to Y Combinator's Demo Day events.

In February 2014, Graham stepped down from his day-to-day role at Y Combinator.

In October 2019, Graham announced a specification for another new dialect of Lisp, written in itself, named Bel.