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Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Worth
Values
Anything
Ideas
Wells
Well
Executing
Creates
Value

More quotes by Sam Altman

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It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with.
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At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.
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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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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.
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... and you can only have 2 or 3 things everyday, because everything else will just come at you you know fires in a day.
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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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Because it's one of these sort of connections between nodes- every pair of people adds communication overhead.
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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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You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.
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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
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Most of the best hires that I've made in my entire life have never done that thing before.
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For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups, it translates to don't let your ship date slip.
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So you should always stay on top of people's vesting schedules.
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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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In general though, if you look at the track record of pivots, they don't become big companies.
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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.
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Most startups are not nearly focussed enough. They work hard...maybe, but they don't work hard on the right things.
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You should think about for the next 10 years, you're going to be giving out 3-5% of the company every year.
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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.
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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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