Quote

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
Death
Suspicious
Work
Infrastructure
Customers
Product
Products
Spiral
Building
Spirals
Getting
Rewrite
Easy
Sucked

More quotes by Sam Altman

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Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.
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1 of the hardest parts about being a founder, is that there are a 100 important things competing for your attention each day.
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You should always know how you're doing against your metrics. You should always have a weekly review meeting every week.
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Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere.
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In the beginning of a company, there is no management and this actually works really well.
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You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.
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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.
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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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Most investors are obsessed with the market size today and they don't think about how the market is going to evolve.
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The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.
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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.
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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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I really believe that the single hardest thing in business is building a company that does repeatable innovation... and just has this ongoing culture of excellence as it grows.
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... how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.
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When it comes to starting startups, in many ways, it's easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup.
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Employees will only add more value over time.
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The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.
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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.
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You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.
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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.
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