Passagepaulgraham.com
Do Things that Don't Scale
The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to.
The part every founder skips on the first read.
annotated.
Chrome sidebar extension
Annotate the internet.
Most links say “watch this.” An annotation says watch this part— and tells you why it matters. Clip up to 90 seconds of any video or podcast, or highlight a passage, straight from your browser's side panel.
Already clipping? Sign in to follow, like & comment
- ≤ 90-second clips
- video capped at 240p
- every clip links to its source
- fair-use claims on every page
How it works
01
Clip from the sidebar
Open the side panel on any YouTube video, news article, or podcast. Grab up to 90 seconds — or capture the exact passage you highlighted.
02
Add your take
Say why it matters in writing, record audio commentary right in the panel, or do both. The take is the point.
03
Publish & discuss
Every annotation gets a public page that links straight back to the original. Followers pick it up in the feed, like it, and comment.
The public feed
What people are clipping and quoting right now.
Video clipyoutube.com
The Brain-Changing Benefits of Exercise | Wendy Suzuki | TED
0:00 → 0:3030ssuper interesting check this out
Video clipyoutube.com
The Brain-Changing Benefits of Exercise | Wendy Suzuki | TED
0:00 → 0:3030sSuper interesting check this out!
Video clipyoutube.com
The Brain-Changing Benefits of Exercise | Wendy Suzuki | TED
0:00 → 0:3030sSuper interesting check this out
Video clipyoutube.com
The Best AI Companies Have Unique Data Acquisition Strategies | Simile Co-founder & CEO
0:00 → 0:3030sSuper interesting
Video clipyoutube.com
Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator | Tim Urban | TED
6:12 → 7:381m 26sThe Panic Monster is the only reason anything ships — including this demo.
Video clipyoutube.com
Travis Kalanick Raises $1.7B for Atoms | Google Cloud Grows 82% But The Market Tanks
0:00 → 0:3030samazing
Audio cliplexfridman.com
Lex Fridman Podcast
Lex asking the question everyone came for, fourteen seconds in. Recorded a voice note with my own take too — hit play on the audio commentary.
Audio clipallin.com
All-In Podcast
The besties arguing about fair use and AI training data — the fifteen seconds where all four of them actually agree is worth preserving.
Audio clipthisweekinstartups.com
This Week in Startups
Eighteen seconds on why every startup pitch is secretly a distribution story. Clip it, save it, send it to the founder who says 'growth will come later.'
Video clipyoutube.com
Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Video)
0:43 → 1:0118sAnnotating the chorus for science. The most-linked 18 seconds in internet history — and yes, you just got a citation instead of a rickroll.
Video clipyoutube.com
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
14:30 → 14:4818s"Stay hungry, stay foolish" gets quoted to death, but watch the eighteen seconds before it — the Whole Earth Catalog framing is what gives the line its weight.
Video clipyoutube.com
Me at the zoo
0:00 → 0:1212sThe first video ever uploaded to YouTube is 19 seconds of a guy admiring elephant trunks. Twenty years of internet video culture, all downstream of this clip.
Passageen.wikipedia.org
Fair use
Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests of copyright holders with the…
Obligatory meta-annotation: every clip on this site lives inside this paragraph. 90 seconds, 240p, always linking back to the source — that's the balance in practice. And if we get it wrong, there's a claim button.
Passagestratechery.com
Aggregation Theory
The value chain for any given consumer market is divided into three parts: supply, distribution, and consumer/end user. The best way to make outsize profits in any of these markets is to either gain a horizontal monopoly in one of the three parts or to integrate two of the parts…
Ten years old and it still explains basically every platform fight on the internet, including the one between publishers and the apps we read them in.
Passageblog.samaltman.com
How To Be Successful
Compound yourself. Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation. You also want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory.
Everyone quotes the compounding line, but the second half is the actual advice: treat yourself as the asset with the exponent, not your portfolio.
Passagepaulgraham.com
How to Do Great Work
The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work. In practice you don't have to worry much about the…
The quiet radical idea here: scope is the criterion people obsess over, and it's the one PG says to ignore. Aptitude and interest compound; scope takes care of itself.
— you're all caught up —