PAUL GRAHAM

Paul Graham is a founder and advisor at Y Combinator, previously based in Mountain View, California. He began his entrepreneurial career by co-founding Viaweb in 1995, building what is widely considered the world's first software-as-a-service application before selling the business to Yahoo in 1998. In 2005, Graham co-founded the startup accelerator Y Combinator, an investment firm that has since funded more than 5,000 companies, including prominent global technology enterprises such as Airbnb and Stripe. Prior to his venture capital career, he earned a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1990, authored multiple influential books on Lisp programming, and invented a widely used spam filtering algorithm in 2002. Although he stepped back from formal leadership in 2014, his current professional focus remains on advising early-stage software startups and publishing extensive essays on technology entrepreneurship.