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PG Paul Graham Paul Graham On Y Combinator Startup Podcast

“That's not just true for programming. That's true for anything consumers use. If you make it 10% easier, you don't just get 10% more people. You get twice as many.”

Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“That's not just true for programming. That's true for anything consumers use. If you make it 10% easier, you don't just get 10% more people. You get twice as many.” — Paul Graham, Y Combinator Startup Podcast

Context

Masad reminded Graham of what he said when he first backed Replit: there is a super-linear relationship between how easy programming is and how many programmers you get. Graham confirms the principle and generalizes it.

Transcript

Y Combinator Startup Podcast Around 07:39 into the episode
Paul Graham

Yeah, I know, I know, because I, the way I program, is the exact opposite of this. I like, I program, you know, I spend three years writing a thousand lines of code. And if I can get it down to 980 in the next month, so much the better. But you

Amjad Masad

give me the principle for all of this, which is when you first invested in Replo, when you first backed Replit, you said there's a super linear relationship between how easy it is to program and how many programmers you get.

Paul Graham

Yes, that's true. That's not just true for programming. That's true for anything consumers use. If you make it 10% easier, you don't just get 10% more people. You get twice as many.

Amjad Masad

Yes.

Paul Graham

Yeah, I remember that. I didn't mean make it this easy.

Amjad Masad

It went too far. I mean, you just talk

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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