Sam Altman Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them.

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

... 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.

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

You have to save the vision speeches for when the company is winning. When you're not winning, you just have to get momentum back.

... you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.

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

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

If someone is getting every decision wrong, that's when you need to act, and at that point it'll be painfully aware to everyone.

In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder.

... We probably funded a rate of something like one out of ten solo teams.

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

So it's worth some real up front time to think through the long term value and the defensibility of the business.

In general though, if you look at the track record of pivots, they don't become big companies.

You're saying no ninety-seven times out of a hundred, and most founders find they have to make a very conscious effort to do this.

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

You certainly don't need to have everything figured out in the path from here to world domination.

Remember that the idea will expand, and become more ambitious as you go.

Most startups are not nearly focussed enough. They work hard...maybe, but they don't work hard on the right things.

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.

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

The idea should come first, the startup should come second.

If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about, when you're not trying to think about work.

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

The hard part is that this is a very fine line. There's right on one side of it, and crazy on the other.

When it comes to starting startups, in many ways, it's easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup.

You need to figure out what the 2 or 3 most important things are, and then just do those.

It takes years and years, usually a decade, to create a great startup.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

You can't be focussed without really great communication

One thing that often disrupts momentum and really shouldn't is competitors.

Employees will only add more value over time.

Many of the best YC companies have had phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders.

The cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high.

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

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