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You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Ideally
Team
Years
Really

More quotes by Sam Altman

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Every company has a rocky beginning.
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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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Obsess about the quality of the product.
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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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You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.
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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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Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building, the ones that do have a huge advantage.
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... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
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Or a way to stay on strangers couches, that just sounds terrible all around.
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Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.
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If someone is getting every decision wrong, that's when you need to act, and at that point it'll be painfully aware to everyone.
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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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Most good founders that I know at any given time have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows.
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You don't get to make their decisions but you do get to choose the decision makers.
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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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Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that's going to be what the whole company focusses on.
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You need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done.
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You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.
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No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.
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I really believe that the single hardest thing in business is building a company that does repeatable innovation... and just has this ongoing culture of excellence as it grows.
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