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Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that's sort of just the sad reality.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Reality
Best
Work
Life
Choice
Balance
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Choices

More quotes by Sam Altman

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Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.
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Unpopular but right is what you're going for.
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If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.
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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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The most common post YC failure case for the companies we fund, is they're incredibly focussed during YC on their company... and after they start doing a lot of other things. They advise companies, they go to conferences, whatever.
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Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.
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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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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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You think you have this great idea that everyone's going to come join, but that's not how it works.
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... you can think about that for everyone you hire: will I bet the future of this company on this single hire? And that's a tough bar.
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If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.
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You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.
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Most things are not as risky as they seem.
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The startups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.
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You need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done.
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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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A board member of mine used to say sales fix everything in a startup, and that is really true.
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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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No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.
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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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