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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
Anything
Ideas
Wells
Well
Executing
Creates
Value
Worth
Values

More quotes by Sam Altman

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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 need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.
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Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.
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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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Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.
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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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The startups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.
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If it works out, you're going to be working on this for 10 years.
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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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What being a founder means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution - and you can't outsource this.
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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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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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... if you talk to say any of the first 40 or 50 employees, they all feel like they were a part of the founding of the company.
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You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.
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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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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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In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.
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For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.
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As you grow, it feels hopelessly corporate but it really is worth putting in place these compensation bands.
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The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself.
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