Best quotes from Sam Altman

Samuel Harris Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. Sam Altman has been involved in various technology and business ventures throughout his career. He has also been an influential figure in Silicon Valley, contributing to discussions about the future of technology, artificial intelligence, and other important industry trends.

Some of the best quotes from Sam Altman are listed below.

1. “A board member of mine used to say sales fix everything in a startup, and that is really true.” – Sam Altman
2. “A lot of people treat choosing their cofounder with even less importance than they put on hiring. Don’t do this.” – Sam Altman
3. “A related advantage of mission-oriented ideas, is that you yourself will be dedicated to them.” – Sam Altman
4. “A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.” – Sam Altman
5. “A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you lose focus…” – Sam Altman
6. “A successful startup takes a very long time – certainly much longer than most founders think at the outset. You cannot treat it as an all-nighter. You have to eat well, sleep well, and exercise. You have to spend time with your family and friends. You also need to work in an area you’re actually passionate about – nothing else will sustain you for ten years.” – Sam Altman
7. “A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn’t won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing.” – Sam Altman
8. “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.” – Sam Altman
9. “AirBnB happened because Brian Chesky couldn’t pay his rent, but did have some space.” – Sam Altman
10. “AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.” – Sam Altman
11. “Always keep momentum, it’s this prime directive for managing a startup.” – Sam Altman
12. “Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.” – Sam Altman
13. “As long as you keep doing the right thing and have the best product, you can beat the bigger company.” – Sam Altman
14. “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.” – Sam Altman
15. “As you grow, it feels hopelessly corporate but it really is worth putting in place these compensation bands.” – Sam Altman
16. “As you grow, the productivity I think, goes down with the square of the number of employees if you don’t make an effort.” – Sam Altman
17. “At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.” – Sam Altman
18. “At YC we have this public phrase, and it’s relentlessly resourceful.” – Sam Altman
19. “Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.” – Sam Altman
20. “Because it’s one of these sort of connections between nodes- every pair of people adds communication overhead.” – Sam Altman
21. “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
22. “Before 20 or 25 employees, most companies are structured with everyone reporting to the founder. It’s totally flat.” – Sam Altman
23. “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
24. “Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.” – Sam Altman
25. “Developing a personal connection with anyone you’re trying to do a big deal with is really important.” – Sam Altman
26. “Don’t let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.” – Sam Altman
27. “Employees will only add more value over time.” – Sam Altman
28. “Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.” – Sam Altman
29. “Every company has a rocky beginning.” – Sam Altman
30. “Every first-time founder waits too long, everyone hopes that an employee will turn around. But the right answer is to fire fast…” – Sam Altman
31. “Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.” – Sam Altman
32. “Everything at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture.” – Sam Altman
33. “Experience matters for some roles and not others.” – Sam Altman
34. “Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality.” – Sam Altman
35. “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
36. “For early employees you want people that have somewhat of a risk-taking attitude.” – Sam Altman
37. “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
38. “For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups, it translates to don’t let your ship date slip.” – Sam Altman
39. “Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.” – Sam Altman
40. “Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.” – Sam Altman
41. “Founders that are hard to talk to are almost always bad.” – Sam Altman
42. “Good startups usually take 10 years.” – Sam Altman
43. “Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere.” – Sam Altman
44. “Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.” – Sam Altman
45. “Here’s a good rule of thumb: don’t worry about a competitor at all, until they’re actually beating you with a real shipped product.” – Sam Altman
46. “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.” – Sam Altman
47. “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
48. “I myself used to believe ideas didn’t matter that much, but I’m very sure that’s wrong now.” – Sam Altman
49. “I prefer to invest in a company that’s going after a small but rapidly growing market than a big but slow growing one.” – Sam Altman
50. “I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.” – Sam Altman
51. “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
52. “Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.” – Sam Altman
53. “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
54. “If it works out, you’re going to be working on this for 10 years.” – Sam Altman
55. “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
56. “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.” – Sam Altman
57. “If someone is getting every decision wrong, that’s when you need to act, and at that point it’ll be painfully aware to everyone.” – Sam Altman
58. “If you can just learn to think about the market first, you will have a big leg up on most people starting startups.” – Sam Altman
59. “If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.” – Sam Altman
60. “If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.” – Sam Altman
61. “If you don’t love and believe in what you’re building, you’re likely to give up at some point along the way.” – Sam Altman
62. “If you don’t need it yourself, and you’re building something that someone else needs, realize you’re at a big disadvantage.” – Sam Altman
63. “If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards.” – Sam Altman
64. “If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about, when you’re not trying to think about work.” – Sam Altman
65. “If you look at successful pivots, they almost always are a pivot into something that the founder wanted. Not a random made-up idea.” – Sam Altman
66. “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
67. “If you want something in a deal, just ask for it.” – Sam Altman
68. “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
69. “In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder.” – Sam Altman
70. “In general don’t start a startup you’re not willing to work on for ten years.” – Sam Altman
71. “In general though, if you look at the track record of pivots, they don’t become big companies.” – Sam Altman
72. “In general, it’s best if you’re building something that you yourself need.” – Sam Altman
73. “In the beginning of a company, there is no management and this actually works really well.” – Sam Altman
74. “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
75. “In the early stage of a startup, hiring senior people is usually a mistake. You just want people that get stuff done.” – Sam Altman
76. “In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.” – Sam Altman
77. “In YC’s case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.” – Sam Altman
78. “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
79. “It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with.” – Sam Altman
80. “It takes years and years, usually a decade, to create a great startup.” – Sam Altman
81. “It’s become popular in recent years to say that the idea doesn’t matter.” – Sam Altman
82. “It’s better to have a few users love your product than for a lot of users to sort of like it.” – Sam Altman
83. “It’s better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it’s still bad to be a solo founder.” – Sam Altman
84. “It’s difficult to get large groups of people, to the extreme levels of focus and productivity that you need, for a startup to be successful.” – Sam Altman
85. “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
86. “It’s worth some real up-front time to think through the long-term value and the defensibility of the business.” – Sam Altman
87. “Just put a little pin in your mind: when you cross 50 employees, there are a new set of HR rules that you have to comply with.” – Sam Altman
88. “Keep salaries low and equity high. Keep the organization as flat as you can.” – Sam Altman
89. “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
90. “Losing focus is another way that founders get off track.” – Sam Altman
91. “Many of the best YC companies have had phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders.” – Sam Altman
92. “Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.” – Sam Altman
93. “Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well.” – Sam Altman
94. “More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.” – Sam Altman
95. “Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven’t managed managers.” – Sam Altman
96. “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
97. “Most investors are obsessed with the market size today and they don’t think about how the market is going to evolve.” – Sam Altman
98. “Most of the best hires that I’ve made in my entire life have never done that thing before.” – Sam Altman
99. “Most things are not as risky as they seem.” – Sam Altman
100. “Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large companies.” – Sam Altman
101. “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
102. “No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.” – Sam Altman
103. “Obsess about the quality of the product.” – Sam Altman
104. “Once your product is working, switch from not caring about this to caring about this a little bit.” – Sam Altman
105. “One of the biggest advantages that startups have is execution speed, and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm.” – Sam Altman
106. “One of the great and terrible things about starting a startup is that you get no credit for trying.” – Sam Altman
107. “One of the hardest parts about being a founder, is that there are a hundred important things competing for your attention each day.” – Sam Altman
108. “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
109. “One thing I tell startups all the time is that the best way to grow is to make their product better.” – Sam Altman
110. “One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.” – Sam Altman
111. “One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them.” – Sam Altman
112. “One thing that often disrupts momentum and really shouldn’t is competitors.” – Sam Altman
113. “Or a way to stay on strangers couches, that just sounds terrible all around.” – Sam Altman
114. “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
115. “Press releases are easier to write than code, and that is still easier than making a great product.” – Sam Altman
116. “Really dig into projects people have worked on and call references; that is another thing that first time founders like to skip.” – Sam Altman
117. “Remember that the idea will expand, and become more ambitious as you go.” – Sam Altman
118. “Remember that you are more likely to die because you execute badly than get crushed by a competitor.” – Sam Altman
119. “Someday everyone will find out everyone else’s comp, if it’s all over the place, it will be a complete meltdown disaster.” – Sam Altman
120. “Someday, you need to build a business that’s difficult to replicate. This is an important part of a good idea.” – Sam Altman
121. “Starting a business is like riding a wave between life and death. If you can hang on long enough, you’re bound to succeed.” – Sam Altman
122. “Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that’s sort of just the sad reality.” – Sam Altman
123. “Startups are very hard no matter what you do; you may as well go after a big opportunity.” – Sam Altman
124. “Stay focused and don’t try to do too many things at once. Care about execution quality.” – Sam Altman
125. “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
126. “The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. They get things done really quickly.” – Sam Altman
127. “The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don’t seem like they’re worth stealing.” – Sam Altman
128. “The best people know that they should join a rocketship.” – Sam Altman
129. “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
130. “The biggest PR hack you can do, is not hire a PR firm.” – Sam Altman
131. “The company just needs to see you as like this maniacal execution machine.” – Sam Altman
132. “The cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high.” – Sam Altman
133. “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
134. “The idea should come first, the startup should come second.” – Sam Altman
135. “The most important thing is that there is clear reporting structure and everyone knows what it is.” – Sam Altman
136. “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
137. “The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level.” – Sam Altman
138. “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
139. “The second part of how to hire: try not to.” – Sam Altman
140. “The single word that matters most I think to keep the company productive as it grows is alignment.” – Sam Altman
141. “The startups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.” – Sam Altman
142. “The tenth social network, and limited only to college students with no money, also terrible. Myspace had won.” – Sam Altman
143. “The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.” – Sam Altman
144. “The thirteenth search engine- and without all the features of a web portal, most people thought that was pointless.” – Sam Altman
145. “The track record for founders that don’t already know each other is really bad.” – Sam Altman
146. “The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself.” – Sam Altman
147. “The way you get deals done and the way you get good terms, is to have a competitive situation.” – Sam Altman
148. “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
149. “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
150. “There’s no way I know, to get through the pain of a startup without belief that the mission really matters.” – Sam Altman
151. “These all sounded really bad, but they turned out to be good. If they had sounded really good, there would have been too many people working on them.” – Sam Altman
152. “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
153. “Unfortunately, the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.” – Sam Altman
154. “Unpopular but right is what you’re going for.” – Sam Altman
155. “Wait to start a startup until you come up with an idea that you feel compelled to explore.” – Sam Altman
156. “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
157. “We pretty much won’t fund a company now where the founders don’t have vested equity because it’s just that hard to do.” – Sam Altman
158. “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
159. “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
160. “When it comes to starting startups, in many ways, it’s easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup.” – Sam Altman
161. “When lack of structure fails, it fails all at once. What works totally fine from 0-20 employees, is disastrous at 30.” – Sam Altman
162. “Why couldn’t it have been done 2 years ago, and why will 2 years in the future be too late?” – Sam Altman
163. “Why now, why is this the perfect time for this particular idea, and to start this particular company?” – Sam Altman
164. “You also want people who are maniacally determined and that is slightly different than having a risk tolerant attitude.” – Sam Altman
165. “You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.” – Sam Altman
166. “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
167. “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
168. “You can win with the best product, the best price, or the best experience.” – Sam Altman
169. “You can’t be focused without really great communication.” – Sam Altman
170. “You cannot create a market that doesn’t want to exist.” – Sam Altman
171. “You certainly don’t need to have everything figured out in the path from here to world domination.” – Sam Altman
172. “You don’t get to make their decisions but you do get to choose the decision makers.” – Sam Altman
173. “You don’t need to make the structure complicated, in fact you shouldn’t. All you need is for every employee to know who their manager is.” – Sam Altman
174. “You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.” – Sam Altman
175. “You have to be intense. This only comes from the CEO, this only comes from the founders.” – Sam Altman
176. “You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly, and then quickly expand.” – Sam Altman
177. “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
178. “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…” – Sam Altman
179. “You need conviction in your own beliefs, and the willingness to ignore others naysaying.” – Sam Altman
180. “You need someone that behaves like James Bond more than you need someone that is an expert in some particular domain.” – Sam Altman
181. “You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.” – Sam Altman
182. “You need to figure out what the 2 or 3 most important things are, and then just do those.” – Sam Altman
183. “You need to have a culture where people have very high-quality standards in everything the company does, but still move quickly.” – Sam Altman
184. “You need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done.” – Sam Altman
185. “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
186. “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
187. “You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.” – Sam Altman
188. “You should always know how you’re doing against your metrics. You should always have a weekly review meeting every week.” – Sam Altman
189. “You should always stay on top of people’s vesting schedules.” – Sam Altman
190. “You should be giving out a lot of equity to your employees.” – Sam Altman
191. “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
192. “You think you have this great idea that everyone’s going to come join, but that’s not how it works.” – Sam Altman
193. “You want an idea about what you can say. I know it sounds like a bad idea but here’s specifically why it’s actually a great one. You want to sound crazy but you want to ask to be right.” – Sam Altman
194. “You want an idea that turns into a monopoly. But you can’t get a monopoly, in a big market right away; too much competition for that.” – Sam Altman
195. “You want to continue to be run by great products, not process for its own sake.” – Sam Altman
196. “You want to sound crazy, but you want to actually be right.” – Sam Altman
197. “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
198. “You’ll get more support on a hard, important, project than a derivative one.” – Sam Altman
199. “You’re either not hiring at all or it’s probably your single biggest block of time.” – Sam Altman
200. “You’re saying no ninety-seven times out of a hundred, and most founders find they have to make a very conscious effort to do this.” – Sam Altman