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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.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Maybe
Enough
Right
Hard
Work
Things
Focussed
Nearly

More quotes by Sam Altman

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Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.
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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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If you pivot, do it fully and with conviction. The worst thing is to try to do a bit of the old and the new-it's hard to kill your babies.
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You need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done.
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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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The single word that matters most I think to keep the company productive as it grows is alignment.
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In general, it's best if you're building something that you yourself need.
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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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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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In general though, if you look at the track record of pivots, they don't become big companies.
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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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One of the biggest advantages that start ups have is execution speed and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm.
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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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Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that's sort of just the sad reality.
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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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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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To get the very best people- they have a lot of great options, and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone.
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... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
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The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
Sam Altman
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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
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