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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.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Family
Many
Thing
Things
Hobbies
Probably

More quotes by Sam Altman

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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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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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Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.
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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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So it's worth some real up front time to think through the long term value and the defensibility of the business.
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... if you talk to say any of the first 40 or 50 employees, they all feel like they were a part of the founding of the company.
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Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven't managed managers.
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The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level.
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Every company has a rocky beginning.
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Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.
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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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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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One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.
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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 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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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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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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Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.
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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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