Sam Altman Quotes

If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards.

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.

I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they'll go on to greatness, or maybe they'll never get off the runway at all.

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.

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.

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.

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 can just learn to think about the market first, you will have a big leg up on most people starting startups.

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

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

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

Developing a personal connection with anyone you're trying to do a big deal with is really important.

Intelligence is usually easy to tell in a 10-minute conversation. Determination is harder.

Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.

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

If you look at successful pivots, they almost always are a pivot into something that the founder wanted. Not a random made up idea.

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

Keep salaries low and equity high. Keep the organization as flat as you can.

You want to think about what is the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows.

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

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

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

Companies generally work better when they are smaller. It's always worth spending time to think about the least amount of projects/work you can feasibly do, and then having as small a team as possible to do it.

If the Reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website, but it will never be a truly great community.

Losing focus is another way that founders get off track.

Don't let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.

The best people know that they should join a rocketship.

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

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

I prefer to invest in a company that's going after a small but rapidly growing market than a big but slow growing one.

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

A lot of people don't love their bank.

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

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

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

The tenth social network, and limited only to college students with no money, also terrible. Myspace had won.

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.

Ideas are cheap and easy, and there are a lot of them.

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

As the company grows and about this 25 or so employee size, your main job shifts from building a great product to building a great company.

A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus ...

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

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

Two other things that we hear again and again from our founders, they wish they had done earlier, and that is ... simply writing down how you do things and why you do things.

Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven't managed managers.

Loopt isn't a service that keeps you locked in, staring at your screen.

What you want to do is innovate on your product and your business model, management structure is not where I would try and innovate.

Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.

I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.

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

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

Remember that you are more likely to die because you execute badly than get crushed by a competitor.

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

Employees will only add more value over time.

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

Generally, you want to raise capital either when you have to or when it's really easy. If the company desperately needs money, and they can't figure out any other way, then they need to raise money. Or if someone's offering you easy money on good terms, you should take it because you can use it for good things.

I think that inexpensive sources of planet-friendly energy are one of the most important things for us to pursue.

Most investors are obsessed with the market size today and they don't think about how the market is going to evolve.

Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that's sort of just the sad reality.

It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

And you can only have 2 or 3 things everyday, because everything else will just come at you; you know fires in a day.

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

You shouldn't try to manufacture progress.

We've seen a lot of data at YC now, and the most successful companies and the ones where the investors do the best ... end up giving a lot of stock out to employees- year after year after year.

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

Whoever Boost works with, Sprint will work with. And whoever Sprint works with, Verizon and AT&T will as well.

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

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

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

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

Growth solves (nearly) all problems

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.

The Loopt mobile app is all about giving you the latest local deals and insider tips.

There is a lot of stuff I like. I love backpacking. I love going to an island where I can just sit on the beach and read or scuba dive and sail. I do a lot of that. I still go backpacking around Europe in the summers and staying in hostels. I love that.

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

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 ...

Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality.

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

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

You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.

I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees.

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

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

I believe that sexism in tech is a real problem.

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

The start-ups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.

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

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

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

The market for local advertising is in the billions.

I get up late, have an espresso, and immediately start work. I try to get roughly caught up on email before I leave the house, then if I need to write anything or review a complex deal, I do that, and then I head to the office and work on my top few priorities for the day. I try to schedule my meetings in the afternoon.

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

Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.

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

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.

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

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.

Someday, you need to build a business that's difficult to replicate. This is an important part of a good idea.

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.