Paul Graham's Success List

A story about how Paul Graham identified future successful entrepreneurs, as told by Jess Mah.

"I had a one-on-one with Paul Graham about 13 years ago, and I asked him to share who he thought would be the most successful people he'd ever met - who would that end up being 30 years from now if you had another one-on-one like this. Sam [Altman] was on the list. I'm not going to share who the others were on that list, but they're all doing extremely well.

I asked Paul what are the things in common with these people. For him, it was less about intelligence. It goes back to grit and being willing to be unconventional and try different approaches. It was about collecting ideas from multiple spaces and merging them together to come up with something even better than what a domain expert in any one field would be able to come up with on their own. It was also about how they show up and what they're willing to do to meet the right people.

He put me on the list too - I'm the worst one by far, so I'm embarrassed and felt like I disappointed him. But that reinforced my wanting to have this policy of 'just get on the plane' because that's a trait that successful people perceive will lead to greatness."