Paul Graham is the co-founder of Y Combinator and one of the foremost philosopher-technologists of our time. For 25 years he has been publishing deep, thoughtful essays on his blog — though rarely. In 2025, for instance, he published just four pieces. In March 2026, a new one appeared: «The Brand Age». I’d like to discuss it.
Why does this matter to me? Among all the authors I follow, Paul Graham comes first. I’ve referenced his essays several times before — in my roundup of resources for product managers, in «The 10 Deadly Sins of a Product Manager», and in «Thinking Through Writing». What I also appreciate is his style: clarifying footnotes and acknowledgments to well-known experts who reviewed his drafts. In this latest essay, the reviewers include Sam Altman, among others. And equally important — there’s no advertising, no promotion of any services.
Here are the key ideas from «The Brand Age» as I see them.
Every technology company has its golden age — a period when technological advantage is the core value driver. But that time always ends.
In the technology race, all solutions converge — products become virtually indistinguishable. Graham’s example: Swiss watches by the late 1960s all looked the same, because every manufacturer was focused on improving just two metrics: accuracy and thinness. He describes the watches of that era as «quiet perfection.»
This is the essence of minimalism — all solutions to a single problem converge on one answer. If I find a great solution, it will be copied. That’s why so many apps and services look and feel alike.
You can see this principle everywhere. Take the current LLM race, where models fight for fractions of a percent on benchmarks. In practice, all the well-known LLMs perform at roughly similar quality and are in constant competition with each other.
When all solutions become equivalent in quality, the nerdy companies that keep treating quality as their defining advantage — die.
Brand is what remains when meaningful differences between products disappear. The ones who survive are those who bet on branding at the right moment.
Good design, like mathematics, seeks the correct answer — and correct answers tend to converge. Branding, however, is orthogonal to good design. Graham says it plainly: there is a fundamental conflict between branding and design, and it cannot be avoided.
To me, this means that at some point a company must stop focusing on product quality and start focusing on recognition. To survive. For someone who lives close to technology, that’s not a comfortable conclusion. But that’s exactly what the brand age is.
Once building brand awareness becomes the primary business goal, design loses its internal logic and starts to look strange.
To avoid ending up in a world of dead design and stagnant technology — the brand age — Graham suggests following the interesting problems: «follow the problems,» so you find yourself in a golden age instead.
So, fellow product managers — let’s stop wasting time on trivial things and start looking for genuinely interesting problems.