Sam Altman Quotes

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

You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.

Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.

Obsess about the quality of the product.

Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.

In general don't start a startup you're not willing to work on for ten years.

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

You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.

If you don't need it yourself, and you're building something that someone else needs, realize you're at a big disadvantage.

Execution gets divided into two key questions: 1) can you figure out what to do and 2) can you get it done.

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

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

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

The best people know that they should join a rocketship.

What being a founder means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution - and you can't outsource this.

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.

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.

Study the unusually successful people you know, and you will find them imbued with enthusiasm for their work which is contagious. Not only are they themselves excited about what they are doing, but they also get you excited

Some day everyone will find out everyone else's comp, if it's all over the place, it will be a complete meltdown disaster

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

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

Startups are very hard no matter what you do; you may as well go after a big opportunity.

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

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

AirBnB happened because Brian Chesky couldn't pay his rent, but did have some space.

A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus.

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

The startups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.

The tenth social network, and limited only to college students with no money, also terrible. Myspace had won.

Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.

AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.

I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.

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

Someday, you need to build a business that's difficult to replicate. This is an important part of a good idea.

... and you can only have 2 or 3 things everyday, because everything else will just come at you; you know fires in a day.

Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.

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.

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

The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It's easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.

Most of the best hires that I've made in my entire life have never done that thing before.

You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.

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

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

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

It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.

At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.

You also really want to take the time to think about how the market is going to evolve.You need a market that's going to be big in 10 years.

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

... if you talk to say any of the first 40 or 50 employees, they all feel like they were a part of the founding of the company.