Paul Graham Once Said Its A 'Bad Idea' To Have Lofty Ambitions Early, 'Neither Bill Gates Nor Mark Zuckerberg Knew How Big Their Companies Would Get'

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham once said that aspiring entrepreneurs should ditch grand "visionary" road maps and instead launch something small that works, then follow its momentum westward like “Columbus."

What Happened: Graham, back in 2012, told attendees at Pycon during a keynote that, "Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with small things and grow them bigger," citing Microsoft‘s first BASIC interpreter and Facebook's dorm-room photo site as examples.

He added, "Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew how big their companies would get. All they knew was that they were onto something."

Lofty business plans, he warned, force founders to project too far into an uncertain future. “Maybe it's a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambitions, the longer they're going to take to realize and the long you're projecting into the future, the more likely you're going to be wrong,” Graham said.

Instead, he advises starting with "something that works, that you know works, that's small" and then moving when opportunity appears. "The popular image of a visionary is someone with a very precise view of the future, but empirically it's probably better to have a blurry one," he said.

Why It Matters: Graham's philosophy aligns with his essays like "Startup = Growth," where he argues that rapid iteration, rather than elaborate forecasts, defines successful startups.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos once said publicly that the toughest test of his career was scraping together Amazon’s first million dollars. This ties back to Graham’s philosophy of setting smaller, achievable targets since they’re likely to feel the toughest to get to.

Critics say his advice counters Silicon Valley's blitz-scale ethos, but Graham maintains incremental growth uncovers real markets and avoids over-promising.

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