Best 190 quotes of Sam Altman on MyQuotes

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

A board member of mine used to say sales fix everything in a startup, and that is really true.

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.

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

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

A lot of people treat choosing their cofounder with even less importance than they put on hiring. Don't do this.

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

A related advantage of mission oriented ideas, is that you yourself will be dedicated to them.

A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.

As long as you keep doing the right thing and have the best product, you can beat the bigger company.

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

As the company grows and about this 25 or so employee size, your main job shifts from building a great product to building a great company.

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

As you grow, the productivity I think, goes down with the square of the number of employees if you don't make an effort.

A third advantage of mission oriented companies, is that people outside the company are more willing to help you.

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

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

A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn't won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing.

Because it's one of these sort of connections between nodes- every pair of people adds communication overhead.

Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building, the ones that do have a huge advantage.

Before 20 or 25 employees, most companies are structured with everyone reporting to the founder. It's totally flat.

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

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.

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

... but actually it sucks to have a lot of employees, and you should be proud of how few employees you have.

... 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.

By the way, that's my number one piece of advice if you're going to join a startup: pick a rocket ship.

Companies that I've been very involved with, that have had a very bad first hire in the first 3 or so employees never recover from it.

Developing a personal connection with anyone you're trying to do a big deal with is really important.

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

Employees will only add more value over time.

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

Every first time founder waits too long, everyone hopes that an employee will turn around. But the right answer is to fire fast.

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

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

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

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

... fire fast when it's not working. It's better for the company, it's also better for the employee.

Firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I think it is the worst.

For early employees you want people that have somewhat of a risk-taking attitude.

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

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

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

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

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

Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere.

Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.

Growth solves (nearly) all problems

Here's a good rule of thumb: don't worry about a competitor at all, until they're actually beating you with a real shipped product.

... how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.