Paul Graham is an English-born American computer scientist, essayist, and entrepreneur.
Paul Graham Net Worth
Paul Graham has a net worth of around $50 million US dollars. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp and his former startup Viaweb which was later renamed Yahoo! Store.
He has written several programming books such as “On Lisp,” in 1993, “ANSI Common Lisp,” in 1995 and “Hacker & Painters” in 2004. In addition, Steve Levy, a technology journalist, has described Paul as a “Hacker Philosopher.”
Graham started publishing essays on his website.
Personal Life
Paul Graham was born on November 13, 1964, in Weymouth, Dorset, in the United Kingdom. His family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1968. He studied at Gateway High School. As a child, he was very interested in science and mathematics mainly because of his father who was a nuclear physicist.
He received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy degree from Cornell University in 1986. He then studied at Harvard University, where he obtained a Master of Science in Computer Science in 1988 and Doctor of Philosophy also in Computer Science in 1990. Apart from that, Paul Graham also studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy.
Professional Career
Paul Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb in 1966. Then they recruited Trevor Blackwell after. Viaweb was the first application service provider (ASP) as stated by Graham. Viaweb is written mostly in Common Lisp, allowing users to create their very own Internet stores. Viaweb was later sold to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at $49.6 million. Viaweb was later renamed to Yahoo! Store.
He also gained prominence as an essayist. A collection of his essays has been published as Hackers & Painters by O’Reilly Media. The essays discuss the growth of Viaweb and why he used Lisp to program it
In 2001, Graham said that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp called Arc. It was released in 2008. He also continued writing essays which described the features and goals of the language. Some of his essays also talked about the internal projects at Y Combinator that have been written in Arc like the Hacker News web forum and news aggregator program.
He gave a talk at Harvard University in 2005 along with Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris. This started Y Combinator to provide funding to startups, especially those who are focused on technology. Y Combinator has invested in a lot of projects including AirBnB, Reddit DropBox, InstaCart, and Stripe Paystack. It has funded more than a thousand start-ups.
BusinessWeek included Paul Graham in their 2008 list of The 25 Most Influential People on the Web.
In October 2019, Graham announced a specification for another new dialect of Lisp, called Bel.
Paul Graham Relationship Status
Paul Graham is married to Jessica Livingston and they have two children. Their family currently resides in the UK.
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