The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
by Randall Stross · 4 Sep 2013 · 332pp · 97,325 words
startup. It was best for founders not to know what was ahead, or they might not even try.1 “Ramen profitable” was one of Graham’s best-known precepts in the world of startups. Ramen profitability refers to the moment when a startup, in Graham’s words, “makes just enough to pay the founders
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to say that he does not prescribe an unhealthy diet of instant ramen. Rice and beans were his recommendation for healthy and inexpensive eating. PG, “Ramen Profitable,” July 2009, www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html. 3. PG, “How Not to Die,” August 2007, http://paulgraham.com/die.html. 4. PG, “The 18 Mistakes
The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future
by Keach Hagey · 19 May 2025 · 439pp · 125,379 words
legal hurdles made that impossible, the fees went to hiring experts and analysts that the oldest YC hands felt went against the scrappy ethos of “ramen profitability” they were trying to preach. IN EARLY 2019, OpenAI announced the creation of a new for-profit subsidiary that would report to its nonprofit parent
Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz · 1 Mar 2013 · 567pp · 122,311 words
the company to its minimum—keeping the lights on, servicing existing customers, but doing little else—could you survive? This is often referred to as “ramen profitability.” There’s no new marketing spend. Your only growth would come from word of mouth or virality, and customers wouldn’t get new features. But
The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher · 14 Feb 2017 · 290pp · 87,549 words
event where the newest classes of entrepreneurs present their business plans to investors. Demo Day was set for March; “profitable” was defined by Graham as “Ramen profitable”—raising enough for the entrepreneurs to afford to feed themselves, even if on cheap store-bought noodle mixes. They had three months. Going in, Chesky
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off, and they could see it in the numbers. The bookings, and the fees to Airbnb, were coming in. A few weeks later they became “Ramen profitable”; they had hit the revenue target—$1,000 in revenue per week—that they’d been aiming for on the chart on their bathroom mirror
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earnings, 73, 110, 112–13, 127 property management, 129 Proposition F, 128–29 prototype operations, 177–78 R Rabois, Keith, 31 racial discrimination, 99–104 “Ramen profitable,” 26, 29 rankings, 16, 72–73, 162 Rasulo, Jay, 196 Rausch Street apartment, 7–8, 14, 25, 36–38, 179, 183, 208 rebranding, 64–67
The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
by Josh Kaufman · 2 Feb 2011 · 624pp · 127,987 words
going for the foreseeable future. Paul Graham, venture capitalist and founder of Y Combinator (an early-stage venture capital firm), calls the point of sufficiency “ramen profitable”—being profitable enough to pay your rent, keep the utilities running, and buy inexpensive food like ramen noodles. You may not be raking in millions
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World
by Parmy Olson · 284pp · 96,087 words
during the summer. While most venture capitalists threw millions of dollars at start-ups, Graham told founders to do more with less, and aim for “ramen profitability,” discouraging them from hiring lawyers, bankers, and PR people so they could do that work more cheaply themselves. Graham himself did everything on a shoestring
Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed
by Alexis Ohanian · 30 Sep 2013 · 216pp · 61,061 words
idea that can generate this kind of growth, raising funding is going to be a feat. So stay cheap (now you know where the phrase “ramen profitable” comes from). Once you’ve got something that’s a proven model and can be turned into an easily replicable (scalable) business, it’s time
Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business
by Arvid Kahl · 24 Jun 2020 · 461pp · 106,027 words
very differently by your drive to generate profits. If you’re living on a shoe-string budget yourself, you may want your business to be ramen-profitable as quickly as possible. A co-founder with a sizeable financial safety net may look at more long-term profitability. Neither perspective is necessarily wrong