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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.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Everybody
Company
Goal
Given
Good
Overarching
Time
Founders
Goals
Small

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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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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 want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.
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You're saying no ninety-seven times out of a hundred, and most founders find they have to make a very conscious effort to do this.
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... the thing we see wrong with YC apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first and what people want first.
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Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.
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When it comes to starting startups, in many ways, it's easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup.
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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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In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.
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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 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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Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.
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Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.
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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 have to let your team get all the credit for all the good stuff that happens, and you take responsibility for the bad stuff.
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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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You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.
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The most important thing is that there is clear reporting structure and everyone knows what it is.
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I really believe that the single hardest thing in business is building a company that does repeatable innovation... and just has this ongoing culture of excellence as it grows.
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The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
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