One of the voices that cuts through the clutter in the world of start-ups and venture capital is Paul Graham. Paul’s latest post speaks to the realities of starting up in a climate like today. Reality: It may be tougher to find investment. Yes, and valuations are impacted but investment still takes place at events like today’s Angel Forum and otherwise.

Reality: As Paul shares, recruiting a killer co-founder is more important than the state of the economy. We hear this refrain consistently from investors considering dealflow, most recently Summit Partners out of Boston, who are following Vancouver start-ups. While a later stage investor, Summit reinforce that the team is job 1 to address for fundability so be realistic about your gaps … then fill them!

On the positive side in a bad economy, competition lessens and as he wraps up the lesson, he reaffirms the gospel that “for a given team on a given technology the time to act is always now.”

As fundfindr.tv strives to share the best resources, advice and content around entrepreneurship with you this post is too good not to re-blog. Some of my other favorite essays well worth your time are Lies we tell kids and How not to die.

Paul is one of the partners in YCombinator for those in the know (yes the 10 million of you who viewed a page on his site in 2007) and for those not - here is the bio from his site:

Paul Graham is the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first ASP, which in 1998 became Yahoo! Store. In 2002 he discovered a simple spam filtering algorithm that inspired the current generation of filters. He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.

Full essay and much other content of value here.