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You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Really
Points
Make
Market
Things
Wants
Wrong
Care
Hard
Work
Something

More quotes by Sam Altman

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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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You certainly don't need to have everything figured out in the path from here to world domination.
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In the beginning of a company, there is no management and this actually works really well.
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... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
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Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.
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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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You don't need to make the structure complicated, in fact you shouldn't. All you need is for every employee to know who their manager is.
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One of the great and terrible things about starting a start up is that you get no credit for trying.
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... how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.
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You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.
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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 can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.
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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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Starting a business is like riding a wave between life and death. If you can hang on long enough, you're bound to succeed
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You can have a startup and one other thing, you can have a family, but you probably can't have many other things.
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In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.
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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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... 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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You need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done.
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No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.
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