Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, investor, and co-founder of the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store.

Y Combinator is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise, PagerDuty, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, Flightfox, and Reddit.

Paul is the author of On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp, and Hackers & Painters. He has an AB from Cornell and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard.