How Paul Graham writes on X: 21 posts, and what they have in common

Paul Graham (@paulg) has 21 posts in the library. Between them they drew 94,652 likes; the typical one reaches 2,051, and the biggest reached 35,876. Most of that work is about Founder and AI. This is what the posts themselves say about how they write — not a profile, a pattern.

What they write about

• Founder — 14 of 21 posts (67%)
• AI — 6 of 21 posts (29%)

Two or three subjects rather than one: a reader who follows for the first gets the others, which is how a niche account becomes a general one.

How they open

• 76% of posts open with an observation
• 10% of posts open with direct address
• 10% of posts open with a question

Half or more of their posts open the same way — an observation. That is a signature, and it is worth reading the three below with that in mind: the move is the same, the subject changes.

A Brown professor gave his students a take-home midterm exam. After suspecting many cheated using AI, he made the final in-person. The orange dots are the midterm scores and the gray dots are the final scores. Looks like all but 3 cheated on the midterm.

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.

One of the biggest things lost in remote work is chance meetings. These are very important, but hard to quantify. If you measure productivity on individual projects, everything will seem fine. Yet when you read stories of how things happened, chance meetings were often crucial.

The posts that did the most

1. @paulg — “A Brown professor gave his students a take-home midterm exam. After suspecting many cheated using AI, he made the final in-person. The oran…” — 35,876 likes · open

Why it worked: Opens with a short, self-contained line that is easy to take in at a glance.

1. @paulg — “A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no foun…” — 10,140 likes · open

Why it worked: Written from experience rather than as advice, which is harder to argue with.

1. @paulg — “One of the biggest things lost in remote work is chance meetings. These are very important, but hard to quantify. If you measure productivi…” — 6,646 likes · open

Why it worked: Opens with a short, self-contained line that is easy to take in at a glance.

1. @paulg — “A recent YC startup spent 250k on a domain. I was slightly shocked. But when I asked how much they raised after YC, the answer was 6.5m. So…” — 5,717 likes · open

Why it worked: Leads with a specific number, which is concrete enough to be worth a second of attention.

1. @paulg — “If you're working on an early stage startup, don't be deterred from using Anthropic just because you might want to sell to the DoD one day.…” — 5,098 likes · open

Why it worked: Addresses the reader directly, so it reads as written for them.

What to borrow

Nothing of theirs — not a phrase, not a number, not a fact. What carries over is the shape.

• From the 35,876-like post: Preserve the Hook → Landing structure and the plain observation opening.
• From the 10,140-like post: Preserve the Hook → Landing structure and the plain observation opening.
• From the 6,646-like post: Preserve the Hook → Landing structure and the plain observation opening.

The structure the analysis reads most often across their best work is Hook → Landing — 4 of the top 5 follow it.

Start here

• Every post of theirs in the library — sortable by likes, replies or date, with the mechanics on each.
• Remix their style — their five strongest posts as sources, your product as the subject. The words will be yours; the moves will be theirs.
• Save the ones that match your taste to a board, and the board's remixes will lean their way.