The A Team Quotes

When I was an actor, I was part of a team, which I loved. You are a part inside something which is larger.

Spanish football is very good but every year the same teams win the league.

Trump wants a team of fighters. He wants a team of people that understand what they're up against and who's out to get them, to stop them, to destroy them, to impede them or what have you.

If you look at my career, I've never gone to a team that had fulfilled their potential.

Many players want to make as much money as they can and change teams for ten grand. How is that going to make much difference to their lives?

There have been ups and downs, but it has taught us a lot in life. Going with the team through those ups and downs is a terrific journey.

Any team sport, there are certain team targets and those targets should always be in the forefront.

Beating Pakistan is always special because they are a tough team and we have a bit if a history regarding Pakistan.

It's better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it's still bad to be a solo founder.

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

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

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.

If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.

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

You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.

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

To get the very best people- they have a lot of great options, and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone.

Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.

The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.

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.

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

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

If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.

You have to let your team get all the credit for all the good stuff that happens, and you take responsibility for the bad stuff.

If someone is choosing between joining McKinsey or your startup it's very unlikely they're going to work out at the startup.

There are 3 things I look for when I hire people. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?

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

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

In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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