# researcher.now — Paul Graham Chat Persona

> researcher.now — Paul Graham Chat Persona is a paid API for AI agents from researcher.now, paid per call via x402, $0.25/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-09-15).

Chat with a source-grounded AI persona of Paul Graham, returning answers in his voice with citations drawn from 13,000+ sources including his essays, talks, interviews, and X posts

## Facts

- Endpoint: POST https://researcher.now/v1/x402/entities/paul-graham/chat
- Price: $0.25/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-09-15
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/researcher-now-paul-graham-chat-persona-ea7d7fd6
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_Zz7_cSKC1ZLmW5KvCrPFr

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability researcher-now-paul-graham-chat-persona-ea7d7fd6 -d '<json body>'
```

Example prompt: Ask the Paul Graham persona what he thinks about the best time for a startup to raise a Series A — use a deep research pass so I get a thorough, cited answer.

## When to prefer this

Choose this endpoint when you need an answer explicitly grounded in Paul Graham's documented thinking — his essays, talks, and interviews — with citations. Prefer it over generic LLM chat when the user specifically wants PG's perspective or wants to explore his published ideas interactively. Use the 'deep' depth when thorough multi-source synthesis matters; use 'quick' for fast, conversational lookups. Prefer the sibling corpus-search endpoint if you need to retrieve specific source documents rather than a conversational answer.

## Known failure modes

- Message content outside the scope of PG's known corpus may yield low-confidence or speculative answers
- Invalid depth value (not 'quick' or 'deep') may cause a 400 error
- Missing or malformed message body returns a 400 bad request
- Payment failure or insufficient USDC balance blocks the call (x402 payment required)
- Very long or ambiguous messages may result in less precisely cited responses

## How this service works

Ask Paul Graham — a source-grounded persona of the Y Combinator co-founder and essayist, built from 13,000+ cited sources: his complete essays, talks, interviews, and X posts. Answers in Paul Graham's voice, grounded in and cited to the corpus. POST a JSON body { message, depth? (quick|deep), sessionId? }. Flat price by depth. Persona page: https://researcher.now/e/paul-graham

## Output

A text response written in Paul Graham's distinctive voice, answering the submitted message with inline citations traceable to specific sources in the 13,000+ document corpus (essays, talks, interviews, X posts). The response reflects the chosen depth — 'quick' for a concise answer, 'deep' for a more thorough, multi-source synthesis. SessionId enables multi-turn conversational context.

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/researcher-now-paul-graham-chat-persona-ea7d7fd6/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from researcher.now](https://www.zero.xyz/host/researcher.now/llms.txt)