Sam Altman Quotes

The way you get deals done and the way you get good terms, is to have a competitive situation.

I care much more about the growth rate of the market than it's current size and I also care if there's any reason it's going to top out.

Once your product is working, switch from not caring about this to caring about this a little bit.

Great execution is at least 10 times more important and a 100 times harder than a good idea.

You don't need to make the structure complicated, in fact you shouldn't. All you need is for every employee to know who their manager is.

One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.

The biggest PR hack you can do, is not hire a PR firm.

If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.

In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.

You cannot create a market that doesn't want to exist.

Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.

Share results (financial and key metrics) with the company every month.

Most good founders that I know at any given time have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows.

You'll get more support on a hard, important, project than a derivative one.

I prefer to invest in a company that's going after a small but rapidly growing market than a big but slow growing one.

Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first...at least 100 employees and often many more.

No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.

The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.

Wait to start a startup until you come up with an idea that you feel compelled to explore.

Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that's going to be what the whole company focusses on.

If you don't love and believe in what you're building, you're likely to give up at some point along the way.

One of the great and terrible things about starting a start up is that you get no credit for trying.

Or a way to stay on strangers couches, that just sounds terrible all around.

You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.

You should think about for the next 10 years, you're going to be giving out 3-5% of the company every year.

There's at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people that are willing to put in the effort to execute them well.

Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.

I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees.

You're either not hiring at all or it's probably your single biggest block of time.

If you're not in college and you don't know a cofounder, the next best thing I think is to go work at an interesting company.

You can have a startup and one other thing, you can have a family, but you probably can't have many other things.

I really believe that the single hardest thing in business is building a company that does repeatable innovation... and just has this ongoing culture of excellence as it grows.

At YC we have this public phrase, and it's relentlessly resourceful.

You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.

In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.

The thirteenth search engine- and without all the features of a web portal, most people thought that was pointless.

You don't get to make their decisions but you do get to choose the decision makers.

You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.

If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards.

It's become popular in recent years to say that the idea doesn't matter.

One of the pieces of advice that we give at YC is: try to work together on a project rather than just doing an interview.

There's no way I know, to get through the pain of a startup without belief that the mission really matters.

More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.

For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups, it translates to don't let your ship date slip.

Losing focus is another way that founders get off track.

1 of the hardest parts about being a founder, is that there are a 100 important things competing for your attention each day.

You never want to be in a place where an employee has vested 3 out of the 4 years of stock and they start thinking about leaving.

Keep salaries low and equity high. Keep the organization as flat as you can.