Quote

The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Good
Seem
Like
Terrible
Often
Seems
Best
Stealing
Ideas
Beginning
Look
Truly
Looks
Worth

More quotes by 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.
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Remember that the idea will expand, and become more ambitious as you go.
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The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.
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... but the pendulum has swung way out of whack here. A bad idea is still bad, and the pivot happy world we're in today feels suboptimal.
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Don't let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.
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... how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.
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No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.
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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.
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... but actually it sucks to have a lot of employees, and you should be proud of how few employees you have.
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Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.
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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.
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You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.
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AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.
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You certainly don't need to have everything figured out in the path from here to world domination.
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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.
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One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them.
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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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You cannot create a market that doesn't want to exist.
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One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.
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Firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I think it is the worst.
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