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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.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Quality
Moving
Easy
Trick
Tricks
Obsessed
Fast
Move

More quotes by Sam Altman

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If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.
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Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.
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You want to sound crazy, but you want to actually be right.
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Remember that the idea will expand, and become more ambitious as you go.
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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 should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.
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You need conviction in your own beliefs, and the willingness to ignore others naysaying.
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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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Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. Not to hire.
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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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Long term thinking is so rare anywhere, but especially in startups. This is a huge advantage if you do it.
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In the beginning of a company, there is no management and this actually works really well.
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One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them.
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Obsess about the quality of the product.
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Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.
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Growth solves (nearly) all problems
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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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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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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 really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.
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