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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
Small
Everybody
Company
Goal
Given
Good
Overarching
Time
Founders
Goals

More quotes by Sam Altman

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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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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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You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.
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You should think about for the next 10 years, you're going to be giving out 3-5% of the company every year.
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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill 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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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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Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well.
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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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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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Growth solves (nearly) all problems
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... but the pendulum has swung way out of whack here. A bad idea is still bad, and the pivot happy world we're in today feels suboptimal.
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In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.
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The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.
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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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Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.
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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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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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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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Developing a personal connection with anyone you're trying to do a big deal with is really important.
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