Inc. Mag­a­zine has a (pos­si­bly too lengthy) pro­file, com­plete with the expected insights, of Paul Gra­ham—author of Hack­ers and Painters, co-founder of Y Com­bi­na­tor, and all-round entre­pre­neur­ship guru.

Cheap meals are, in a strange way, part of Y Combinator’s for­mula for start-up suc­cess. Gra­ham wants founders to spend as lit­tle money as pos­si­ble. Live cheaply enough, he believes, and you can become cash-flow pos­i­tive with­out going on a lot of sales calls or spend­ing too much time talk­ing to investors. Gra­ham calls this “ramen prof­itabil­ity” and says it allows com­pa­nies to say no to bad invest­ment terms and forces them to think about long-term via­bil­ity. […] “That cul­ture of fru­gal­ity and dis­ci­pline is really impor­tant for the Y Com­bi­na­tor mind­set,” says Sam Alt­man, founder of Loopt, a grad­u­ate of Y Combinator’s first class. “The start-ups that do well are the ones that are work­ing all the time.”

[…] Despite hav­ing spent five years paint­ing, Gra­ham long ago put away his brushes. None of his work is on dis­play in his home in Palo Alto, and he’s none too eager to talk about mat­ters of tech­nique or style. But one thing paint­ing taught him was the value of liv­ing fru­gally. “It taught me how to do cheap in a cool way,” Gra­ham says. Artists, Gra­ham dis­cov­ered, don’t pre­tend to be rich; they live in sparsely dec­o­rated lofts and wear cool vin­tage clothes. “A start-up is that phi­los­o­phy applied to business.”