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One of the great and terrible things about starting a start up is that you get no credit for trying.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Starting
Terrible
Start
Great
Trying
Things
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One thing I tell startups all the time is that the best way to grow is to make their product better.
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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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The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.
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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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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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Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.
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Developing a personal connection with anyone you're trying to do a big deal with is really important.
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Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.
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In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.
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Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that's going to be what the whole company focusses on.
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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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So always keep momentum, it's this prime directive for managing a startup.
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It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.
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You should always know how you're doing against your metrics. You should always have a weekly review meeting every week.
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You want to sound crazy, but you want to actually be right.
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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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If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about, when you're not trying to think about work.
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One thing that often disrupts momentum and really shouldn't is competitors.
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If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.
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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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