Paul Graham at The Family

European Straits #11

Dear all,

Paul Graham was at The Family’s Paris office last Saturday (April 1). His visit was announced only the night before, which led many people to believe that it was an April’s Fool’s joke. Well, it wasn’t, and our portfolio founders who attended had the privilege of participating in a fireside chat between the legendary early-stage investor and my co-founder & partner Oussama Ammar.

Among the many insights that Paul shared with us was his view on the most important quality that makes successful Entrepreneurs: being earnest. As always with Paul Graham, an engineer by training, it’s all about systems: when he looks at things he divides them into elementary components and looks at the forces that explain the dynamic relationship between those components. And indeed being earnest matters for a systemic reason: it helps founders resist the many acquisition offers they receive on their path to building a global empire. In Paul’s own words:

“There’s a very, very mundane reason for (the i…