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The second part of how to hire: try not to.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Team
Part
Trying
Hire
Second

More quotes by Sam Altman

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The best people know that they should join a rocketship.
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Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.
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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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... the thing we see wrong with YC apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first and what people want first.
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Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large companies.
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You're saying no ninety-seven times out of a hundred, and most founders find they have to make a very conscious effort to do this.
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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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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.
Sam Altman
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Losing focus is another way that founders get off track.
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Because it's one of these sort of connections between nodes- every pair of people adds communication overhead.
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Companies that I've been very involved with, that have had a very bad first hire in the first 3 or so employees never recover from it.
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... you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.
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The startups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.
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For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.
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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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I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees.
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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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Remember that the idea will expand, and become more ambitious as you go.
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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.
Sam Altman