Sam Altman Quotes

These all sounded really bad, but they turned out to be good. If they had sounded really good, there would have been too many people working on them.

The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. They get things done really quickly.

Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality.

It's difficult to get large groups of people, to the extreme levels of focus and productivity that you need, for a startup to be successful.

You want an idea that not many other people are working on, and it's okay if it doesn't sound big at first.

Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture.

It's better to have a few users love your product than for a lot of users to sort of like it.

The second part of how to hire: try not to.

We talk to a team they've gotten new things done, that's the best predictor we have that a company will be successful.

You have to be intense. This only comes from the CEO, this only comes from the founders.

Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.

Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that's sort of just the sad reality.

If someone is difficult to talk to, if someone cannot communicate clearly, it's a real problem in terms of their likelihood to work out.

In the early days of a startup, people's compensation is whatever you negotiate with a founder and it's all over the place.

No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.

You want to think about what is the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows.

The best source by far for hiring is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know.

Unpopular but right is what you're going for.

You need to have a culture where people have very high quality standards in everything the company does, but still move quickly.

For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.

Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you'll probably end up in a pretty good place.

You want to continue to be run by great products, not process for it's own sake.

... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.

Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. Not to hire.

Every company has a rocky beginning.

... you can think about that for everyone you hire: will I bet the future of this company on this single hire? And that's a tough bar.

M&A negotiations feel really fun. This is one of the biggest killers of companies, is they entertain acquisition conversations.

One of the biggest advantages that start ups have is execution speed and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm.

As you grow, it feels hopelessly corporate but it really is worth putting in place these compensation bands.

In the beginning of a company, there is no management and this actually works really well.

Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.

Most investors are obsessed with the market size today and they don't think about how the market is going to evolve.

People that are really smart and that can learn new things can almost always find a role in the company as time goes on.

I myself used to believe ideas didn't matter that much, but I'm very sure that's wrong now.

... but the pendulum has swung way out of whack here. A bad idea is still bad, and the pivot happy world we're in today feels suboptimal.

We hear again and again from founders, that they wish they had waited to start a startup until they came up with an idea they really loved.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.

The company just needs to see you as like this maniacal execution machine.

Stay focused and don't try to do too many things at once. Care about execution quality.

Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.

You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.

If you look at successful pivots, they almost always are a pivot into something that the founder wanted. Not a random made up idea.

If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.

You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand.

Investors will sort of like write the check and then, despite a lot of promises, don't usually do that much; sometimes they do.

So always keep momentum, it's this prime directive for managing a startup.

Don't let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.

The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.