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Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It's easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Getting
Rewrite
Easy
Sucked
Death
Suspicious
Work
Infrastructure
Customers
Product
Products
Spiral
Building
Spirals

More quotes by Sam Altman

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It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.
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So it's worth some real up front time to think through the long term value and the defensibility of the business.
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... fire fast when it's not working. It's better for the company, it's also better for the employee.
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The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level.
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Obsess about the quality of the product.
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Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that's going to be what the whole company focusses on.
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You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.
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Unpopular but right is what you're going for.
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Some day everyone will find out everyone else's comp, if it's all over the place, it will be a complete meltdown disaster
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The startups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.
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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.
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One of the biggest advantages that start ups have is execution speed and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm.
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Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere.
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Most things are not as risky as they seem.
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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.
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Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that's sort of just the sad reality.
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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.
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You think you have this great idea that everyone's going to come join, but that's not how it works.
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Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.
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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.
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