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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

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Team
Sufficiently
Term
Sales
Idea
Marketing
Ideas
Product
Long
Brilliant
Good
Save
Products
Hack
Growth
Hacks

More quotes by Sam Altman

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Most investors are obsessed with the market size today and they don't think about how the market is going to evolve.
Sam Altman
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The cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high.
Sam Altman
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In the early stage of a startup, hiring senior people is usually a mistake. You just want people that get stuff done.
Sam Altman
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Long term thinking is so rare anywhere, but especially in startups. This is a huge advantage if you do it.
Sam Altman
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If you want something in a deal, just ask for it.
Sam Altman
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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.
Sam Altman
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You need to figure out what the 2 or 3 most important things are, and then just do those.
Sam Altman
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Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere.
Sam Altman
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... 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
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The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level.
Sam Altman
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You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.
Sam Altman
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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
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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
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A board member of mine used to say sales fix everything in a startup, and that is really true.
Sam Altman
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The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
Sam Altman
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You need to have a culture where people have very high quality standards in everything the company does, but still move quickly.
Sam Altman
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Losing focus is another way that founders get off track.
Sam Altman
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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
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So you should always stay on top of people's vesting schedules.
Sam Altman
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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