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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.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Founder
Founders
Competing
Hardest
Parts
Attention
Important
Things

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Long term thinking is so rare anywhere, but especially in startups. This is a huge advantage if you do it.
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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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When lack of structure fails, it fails all at once. What works totally fine from 0-20 employees, is disastrous at 30.
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Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large companies.
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Unpopular but right is what you're going for.
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The role of the board is advice and consent. If the CEO does not lay out a clear strategy and tries to get the board to set one, it will usually end in disaster.
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You need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done.
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Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven't managed managers.
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You have to save the vision speeches for when the company is winning. When you're not winning, you just have to get momentum back.
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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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Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere.
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Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.
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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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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
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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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If someone is getting every decision wrong, that's when you need to act, and at that point it'll be painfully aware to everyone.
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Or a way to stay on strangers couches, that just sounds terrible all around.
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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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At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.
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Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well.
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