Making Startups Powerful

In a September 2026 essay, Paul Graham argues that asking what would make a startup more powerful, rather than more profitable, can surface far larger opportunities. His tactics include owning the customer relationship, routing money through the company, adding network effects, going full stack, offering APIs, and selling to fast-deciding early-stage customers. Every move must also benefit the customer. The PayPal, Stripe and Rippling examples and the 2x versus 10-100x return figures are his own assertions, without cited sources, so they read as experience-based heuristics.