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You need to have a culture where people have very high quality standards in everything the company does, but still move quickly.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Culture
Stills
Quickly
Doe
Standards
Still
Move
Everything
Company
Need
Quality
Needs
High
People
Moving

More quotes by Sam Altman

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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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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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I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.
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Don't let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.
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Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.
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You need to figure out what the 2 or 3 most important things are, and then just do those.
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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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In general, it's best if you're building something that you yourself need.
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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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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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... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
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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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Remember that the idea will expand, and become more ambitious as you go.
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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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You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.
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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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... 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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So you should always stay on top of people's vesting schedules.
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AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.
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Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that's sort of just the sad reality.
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