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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

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Learn
Scales
Fast
Later
Early
Team
Days
Company
Hire
Goal
Scale

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Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.
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You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.
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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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Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere.
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Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.
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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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If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about, when you're not trying to think about work.
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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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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
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In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder.
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What being a founder means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution - and you can't outsource this.
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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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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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The role of the board is advice and consent. If the CEO does not lay out a clear strategy and tries to get the board to set one, it will usually end in disaster.
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Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.
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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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Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large companies.
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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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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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... 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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