A Quote by Sam Altman
You want to think about what is the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows.
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I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.
If Obama raises my company's taxes by 20 percent, how am I going to be able to survive as a company? Well, if I've got 30 employees, that means I'm going to have to lay off 10 employees so I can be able to keep up with the health and benefits and pension plans for my other 20 employees.
The company [Microsoft] really has to chart a direction in mobile devices. Because if you're going to be mobile-first, cloud-first you really do need to have a sense of what you're doing in mobile devices. I had put the company on a path. The board as I was leaving took the company on a path by buying Nokia, they kind of went ahead with that after I told them I was going to go. The company, between me and the board, had taken that sort of view. Satya, he's certainly changed that. He needs to have a clear path forward. But I'm sure he'll get there.
As one of the first employees at a small cellular phone start-up called Nextel, I gained firsthand experience in how a business grows from an idea to a company that, at its peak, employed many thousands.
The reality is the only place a company's culture is going to start and end is at the beginning of that company. And it always starts with the founders. So if you can't create an environment of founders and founding employees who are going to represent the company you want, then you are never going to get there. You have to look at your own network and find what you are missing. So if you don't have a female or someone who has an international perspective or a person with a bio degree, but those perspectives matter to the firm or product you want to create, then it's never going to work out.
Other countries around the world make employees and retirees first in the priority. For example, in Mexico, the bankruptcy laws say if a company wants to go bankrupt... obligations to employees and retirees will have a first priority. That has an effect on every negotiation that takes place with every company in Mexico.
I think that everyone that grows up and aspires to be a tennis player dreams about being in the top 10 and pushing from there and going as far as you can.
As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago?
As far as the press is concerned, they're going to say what they want to say. Probably about 10-15 percent of the time It's accurate.
You should think about for the next 10 years, you're going to be giving out 3-5% of the company every year.
My first real business was bootlegging T-shirts - I was just a dumb kid. You go to a concert and pay $25 for a cotton T-shirt that says 'Rolling Stones,' 'Lollapalooza,' or whatever. On the outside they're 10 or 15 bucks. We were the guys selling them for 10 or 15 bucks.
I would say that things like the head tax in Seattle I think are super dangerous for cities to implement. What company is going to want to start - or move to or grow in - a city that penalizes them for hiring full-time employees?
Who comes first? Don't be silly, says King Hal; it's employees. That is - and this dear Watson, is elementary - if you genuinely want to put customers first, you must put employees more first.
We want employees teaching each other what they know. We're tying to build a company so each person can achieve at a very high level - we're not just the engineering company or the design company.
Something worth doing might take a while, so really flesh out the potential of the business and be honest about whether it's worth doing. If it's not a $100 million company in five years, maybe it'll take 10 or 15 years. If you're doing something that has a universal, timeless need, then you need to think of the company in a timeless way.
When you're in a start-up, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10 percent of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all the A players? If three were not so great, why would you want a company where 30 percent of your people are not so great? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does.
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