Sam Altman Quotes

#1. 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

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

Sam Altman

#3. The biggest PR hack you can do, is not hire a PR firm.

Sam Altman

#4. No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#7. It's so important for startups to get their culture right at the start. They need to feel unique and that they are on their own important mission in the world.

Sam Altman

#8. You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.

Sam Altman

#9. 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.

Sam Altman

#10. You cannot create a market that doesn't want to exist.

Sam Altman

#11. Very ambitious startups often take a long time to work - or sometimes they take a very long time to look ambitious.

Sam Altman

#12. 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

#13. That culture of frugality and discipline is really important for the Y Combinator mindset.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#15. You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.

Sam Altman

#16. 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.

Sam Altman

#17. Good startups usually take 10 years.

Sam Altman

#18. 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

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

Sam Altman

#20. If you have a startup that's keeping it up at night because you think it's so great, then you should do that.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#22. You should think about for the next 10 years, you're going to be giving out 3-5% of the company every year.

Sam Altman

#23. The thing about Y Combinator that's cool is that most companies won't happen if we don't fund them.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#26. 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

#27. If a company is profitable, the founder is in control. If it's not, investors are in control.

Sam Altman

#28. In the early stage of a startup, hiring senior people is usually a mistake. You just want people that get stuff done.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#30. Most things are not as risky as they seem.

Sam Altman

#31. Technology magnifies differences, and it's been replacing or obviating jobs for a long time. But what happens as that case accelerates? I'm not one of these doomsayers who says, 'There will be no jobs.'

Sam Altman

#32. 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.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#37. Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere.

Sam Altman

#38. Unpopular but right is what you're going for.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#41. 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

#42. With Loopt Star, consumers get to tap interactive rewards wherever they may be.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#44. The biggest part of Loopt is about discovering the world around you, never replacing a social experience - only adding to it.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#46. What is OK is to spend money for productivity. What is not OK is just to light money on fire.

Sam Altman

#47. 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

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

Sam Altman

#49. You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly, and then quickly expand.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#51. Seed investing is the status symbol of Silicon Valley. Most people don't want Ferraris, they want a winning seed investment.

Sam Altman

#52. Why I said cofounders that aren't friends really struggle, is that you can't be focused without good communication.

Sam Altman

#53. 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

#54. 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.

Sam Altman

#55. You'll get more support on a hard, important, project than a derivative one.

Sam Altman

#56. 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

#57. I have plenty of investments that I wish I'd never made. But the model is to lose money on a lot of investments and then make 1,000X or 10,000X on an investment.

Sam Altman

#58. Maybe I am a bit unusual here, but I am less stressed if I have my phone with me. Because I can spend like an hour in the morning taking care of everything instead of I sit there and wonder what I missed or wonder what's happening. So it's way less stressful for me to just answer my phone.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#60. The most important thing is that there is clear reporting structure and everyone knows what it is.

Sam Altman

#61. You can have a startup and one other thing, you can have a family, but you probably can't have many other hobbies.

Sam Altman

#62. Many of the companies in the mobile location space are trying to figure out different ways to tie what they're doing to commerce.

Sam Altman

#63. I care much more about the growth rate of the market than it's current size and I also care if there's any reason it's going to top out.

Sam Altman

#64. More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.

Sam Altman

#65. People appreciate when you make an effort to speak their language.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#68. Don't hire for the sake of hiring. Hire because there is no other way to do what you want to do.

Sam Altman

#69. 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.

Sam Altman

#70. The only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you're making sufficiently good.

Sam Altman

#71. Location is the sole difference between mobile and traditional Web.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#74. You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#76. I don't often get involved with campaigns at all.

Sam Altman

#77. The whole concept of rewarding customers is a big trend.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#80. The correlation of quality of life and cost of energy is huge.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#82. 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?

Sam Altman

#83. You want an idea about what you can say. I know it sounds like a bad idea but here's specifically why its actually a great one. You want to sound crazy but you want to ask to be right.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#85. If you want something in a deal, just ask for it.

Sam Altman

#86. If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.

Sam Altman

#87. One thing I tell startups all the time is that the best way to grow is to make their product better.

Sam Altman

#88. You can't be focussed without really great communication

Sam Altman

#89. You have to be intense. This only comes from the CEO, this only comes from the founders.

Sam Altman

#90. I don't think people spend nearly enough time thinking about what they like and what they're good at.

Sam Altman

#91. 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

#92. Experience matters for some roles and not others.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#94. I think you can say a lot of evil behavior by companies is short-term optimization.

Sam Altman

#95. Long term thinking is so rare anywhere, but especially in startups. This is a huge advantage if you do it.

Sam Altman

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

Sam Altman

#97. Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large competitors.

Sam Altman

#98. 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.

Sam Altman

#99. Why now, why is this the perfect time for this particular idea, and to start this particular company?

Sam Altman

#100. Everyone is looking for the hack, the secret to success without hard work.

Sam Altman