Startup Experts Discuss Doing Things That Don't Scale

TL;DR

Paul Graham’s essay “Do Things That Don’t Scale” inverted Silicon Valley’s obsession with scalability by urging founders to focus on getting their first customers and delighting them through manual, one‑off efforts.

Key insights

• Scalability obsession originated from Google’s success and made investors refuse to fund companies without a scalable solution, creating the problem Paul Graham’s essay solved.
• The main goal of doing things that don’t scale is to maximize learning per unit time, not to avoid scaling forever.
• Manual, unscalable work teaches founders product, pricing, and demand dynamics that a marketplace webpage cannot reveal.