Sam Altman Quotes

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

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

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

You think you have this great idea that everyone's going to come join, but that's not how it works.

... 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.

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

There are exceptions of course, but most companies start with a great idea - not a pivot.

We pretty much won't fund a company now where the founders don't have vested equity because it's just that hard to do.

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

... 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.

One of the keys to focus, and why I said cofounders that aren't friends really struggle, is that you can't be focused without good communication.

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

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

It's really easy to get PR with no results & it actually feels like you're really actually cool, but in a year you'll still have nothing.

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

I think the best thing you can do is be aware that as a first time founder you are likely to be a very bad manager.

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

... the thing we see wrong with YC apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first and what people want first.

Every company has a rocky beginning.

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

Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large companies.

You need someone that behaves like James Bond more than you need someone that is an expert in some particular domain.

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

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

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

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

If you pivot, do it fully and with conviction. The worst thing is to try to do a bit of the old and the new-it's hard to kill your babies.

Growth solves (nearly) all problems

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

The single word that matters most I think to keep the company productive as it grows is alignment.

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

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.

The role of the board is advice and consent. If the CEO does not lay out a clear strategy and tries to get the board to set one, it will usually end in disaster.

So you should always stay on top of people's vesting schedules.

You need conviction in your own beliefs, and the willingness to ignore others naysaying.

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

So if you want a culture where people work hard, & pay attention to detail, focus on the customer, are frugal: you have to do it yourself.

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

You want an idea that turns into a monopoly. But you can't get a monopoly, in a big market right away; too much competition for that.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

When lack of structure fails, it fails all at once. What works totally fine from 0-20 employees, is disastrous at 30.

Losing focus is another way that founders get off track.

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

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.

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