Top 100 Sam Altman Quotes
#1. Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.
Sam Altman
#2. 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.
Sam Altman
#3. You'll get more support on a hard, important, project than a derivative one.
Sam Altman
#4. Traditional local advertising is not what retailers want. They want not just for you to see an ad - they want you to come into the store, to be a repeat customer and to spread the word.
Sam Altman
#5. Everyone is looking for the hack, the secret to success without hard work.
Sam Altman
#6. Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large competitors.
Sam Altman
#7. Experience matters for some roles and not others.
Sam Altman
#8. What you want to do is innovate on your product and your business model, management structure is not where I would try and innovate.
Sam Altman
#9. I don't think people spend nearly enough time thinking about what they like and what they're good at.
Sam Altman
#10. You need to have a culture where people have very high quality standards in everything the company does, but still move quickly.
Sam Altman
#11. It's become popular in recent years to say that the idea doesn't matter.
Sam Altman
#12. You need conviction in your own beliefs, and the willingness to ignore others naysaying.
Sam Altman
#13. 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.
Sam Altman
#14. Good startups usually take 10 years.
Sam Altman
#15. If you ask a founder how their company is doing, they always say, 'Oh it's great. We're totally crushing it,' and that's almost never true.
Sam Altman
#16. 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.
Sam Altman
#17. The biggest PR hack you can do, is not hire a PR firm.
Sam Altman
#18. In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder.
Sam Altman
#19. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.
Sam Altman
#20. What is OK is to spend money for productivity. What is not OK is just to light money on fire.
Sam Altman
#21. A related advantage of mission oriented ideas, is that you yourself will be dedicated to them.
Sam Altman
#22. People that are really smart and that can learn new things can almost always find a role in the company as time goes on.
Sam Altman
#23. The most common post YC failure case for the companies we fund, is they're incredibly focussed during YC on their company ... and after they start doing a lot of other things. They advise companies, they go to conferences, whatever.
Sam Altman
#24. Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.
Sam Altman
#25. How much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.
Sam Altman
#26. Most things are not as risky as they seem.
Sam Altman
#27. As you grow, it feels hopelessly corporate but it really is worth putting in place these compensation bands.
Sam Altman
#28. If a company is profitable, the founder is in control. If it's not, investors are in control.
Sam Altman
#29. It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.
Sam Altman
#30. It's better to have a few users love your product than for a lot of users to sort of like it.
Sam Altman
#31. The best people know that they should join a rocketship.
Sam Altman
#32. You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.
Sam Altman
#33. Keep salaries low and equity high. Keep the organization as flat as you can.
Sam Altman
#34. It's easy to say, 'I'm going to build something that already exists,' but it's difficult to clearly and succinctly describe something new.
Sam Altman
#35. I always tell my partners that our job is to fund all the companies we can that can be worth $10 billion or more. That's such a difficult constraint, we can't have any other constraints.
Sam Altman
#36. Startups on the inside are always badly broken.
Sam Altman
#37. One of the things we urge Y-Combinator companies to do is to have profitability in grasp. If you need to get profitable before your A round of money, you ought to be able to do that.
Sam Altman
#39. Ideas are cheap and easy, and there are a lot of them.
Sam Altman
#40. Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture.
Sam Altman
#41. AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.
Sam Altman
#42. The Loopt mobile app is all about giving you the latest local deals and insider tips.
Sam Altman
#43. If you go to a paintball subreddit, paintball companies can advertise to you.
Sam Altman
#44. The nice thing about Reddit is, we don't have to sell your data or build a profile of you or do stuff that makes people feel uncomfortable.
Sam Altman
#45. Some day everyone will find out everyone else's comp, if it's all over the place, it will be a complete meltdown disaster
Sam Altman
#46. I think that inexpensive sources of planet-friendly energy are one of the most important things for us to pursue.
Sam Altman
#47. 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
Sam Altman
#48. 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.
Sam Altman
#49. You never want to be in a place where an employee has vested 3 out of the 4 years of stock and they start thinking about leaving.
Sam Altman
#50. If it works out, you're going to be working on this for 10 years.
Sam Altman
#51. 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.
Sam Altman
#52. If you have the opportunity to go be an early employee at a company that's just going crazy, and you believe it's the next Facebook or Google, you should go join that company.
Sam Altman
#53. By the way, that's my number one piece of advice if you're going to join a startup: pick a rocket ship.
Sam Altman
#54. The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. They get things done really quickly.
Sam Altman
#55. You want to think about what is the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows.
Sam Altman
#56. Virgin America flyers tend to be more likely to be using a mobile device and tapping social networks - even at 35,000 feet.
Sam Altman
#57. Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven't managed managers.
Sam Altman
#58. In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.
Sam Altman
#59. In the early days of a startup, people's compensation is whatever you negotiate with a founder and it's all over the place.
Sam Altman
#60. Remember that you are more likely to die because you execute badly than get crushed by a competitor.
Sam Altman
#61. Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that's sort of just the sad reality.
Sam Altman
#62. You need someone that behaves like James Bond more than you need someone that is an expert in some particular domain.
Sam Altman
#63. Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.
Sam Altman
#64. The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.
Sam Altman
#65. To get the very best people- they have a lot of great options, and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone.
Sam Altman
#66. The reduction in compassion that happens when we're all behind computer screens is not good for the world.
Sam Altman
#67. 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.
Sam Altman
#68. For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.
Sam Altman
#69. Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building, the ones that do have a huge advantage.
Sam Altman
#70. Stay focused and don't try to do too many things at once. Care about execution quality.
Sam Altman
#71. The cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high.
Sam Altman
#72. The crowd's a really powerful force on the Internet, and people finally understand how to harness that.
Sam Altman
#73. You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.
Sam Altman
#74. Tech companies tend to do tech best.
Sam Altman
#75. All the reasons that have made software so successful are beginning to happen with hardware. So much can be done so quickly, prototyped so rapidly, and the costs are so low.
Sam Altman
#76. 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 ...
Sam Altman
#77. Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well.
Sam Altman
#78. 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.
Sam Altman
#79. I grew up with a computer, and many of my friends were people I met online.
Sam Altman
#80. Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.
Sam Altman
#81. Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.
Sam Altman
#82. If you're not in college and you don't know a cofounder, the next best thing I think is to go work at an interesting company.
Sam Altman
#83. Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.
Sam Altman
#84. A lot of people don't love their bank.
Sam Altman
#85. One of the pieces of advice that we give at YC is: try to work together on a project rather than just doing an interview.
Sam Altman
#86. A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus ...
Sam Altman
#87. A third advantage of mission oriented companies, is that people outside the company are more willing to help you.
Sam Altman
#88. If you wanted to build an Internet startup in 2005, you had to buy your own servers and hire someone to manage it. Now, that's unheard of.
Sam Altman
#89. The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself.
Sam Altman
#90. Because it's one of these sort of connections between nodes- every pair of people adds communication overhead.
Sam Altman
#91. Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.
Sam Altman
#92. You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.
Sam Altman
#93. The single word that matters most I think to keep the company productive as it grows is alignment.
Sam Altman
#94. The best source by far for hiring is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know.
Sam Altman
#95. Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.
Sam Altman
#96. 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.
Sam Altman
#97. Firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I think it is the worst.
Sam Altman
#98. You need to figure out what the 2 or 3 most important things are, and then just do those.
Sam Altman
#99. The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.
Sam Altman
#100. Startups are very hard no matter what you do; you may as well go after a big opportunity.
Sam Altman
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