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A board member of mine used to say sales fix everything in a startup, and that is really true.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Mine
Members
True
Used
Sales
Everything
Board
Really
Boards
Member
Mines

More quotes by Sam Altman

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In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder.
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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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... 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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Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.
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Most of the best hires that I've made in my entire life have never done that thing before.
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Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.
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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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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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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill 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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The single word that matters most I think to keep the company productive as it grows is alignment.
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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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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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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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For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups, it translates to don't let your ship date slip.
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One of the biggest advantages that start ups have is execution speed and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm.
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One of the great and terrible things about starting a start up is that you get no credit for trying.
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Startups are very hard no matter what you do you may as well go after a big opportunity.
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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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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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