Top 331 Quotes & Sayings by Sam Altman - Page 2

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.

People are incredible creatures of habit.

I wouldn't call Loopt a failure. It didn't turn out like I wanted, for sure, but it was fun, I learned a lot, and I made enough money to start investing, which led me to my current job. I don't regret it at all.

I believe that sexism in tech is a real problem.

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

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

Loopt wouldn't have happened without Y Combinator.

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.

For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.

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

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

I believe whatever smart, ambitious people are working on will be the trend of the future. I do think that it's worth thinking critically about what the future will be.

Set a clear, easy-to-understand vision for your company, and make it be a mission people believe in.

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

Many founders hire just because it seems like a cool thing to do, and people always ask how many employees you have.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

The reduction in compassion that happens when we're all behind computer screens is not good for the world.

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.

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.

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

There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things. Founders are able to set the vision for their companies with an authority no one else can.

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

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.

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

People always make the mistake of calling an idea small or stupid because they don't understand how it's going to evolve.

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.

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

The way to build billion dollar companies is to first build something people love. There isn't really a shortcut there.

The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.

The whole concept of rewarding customers is a big trend.

All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.

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

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

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.

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

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.

You should be giving out a lot of equity to your employees.

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

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

If someone is difficult to talk to, if someone cannot communicate clearly, it's a real problem in terms of their likelihood to work out.

Execution gets divided into two key questions: 1) can you figure out what to do and 2) can you get it done.

Obsess about the quality of the product.

What being a founder means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution?-?and you can't outsource this.

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

Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you'll probably end up in a pretty good place.

In general don't start a startup you're not willing to work on for ten years.

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.

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.

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

It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with.

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.

Most things are not as risky as they seem.

No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.

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

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