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One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Recruit
Founders
Underestimate
Team
Hard
Thing
Always

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You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.
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Starting a business is like riding a wave between life and death. If you can hang on long enough, you're bound to succeed
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Or a way to stay on strangers couches, that just sounds terrible all around.
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If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.
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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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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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... if you talk to say any of the first 40 or 50 employees, they all feel like they were a part of the founding of the company.
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In general though, if you look at the track record of pivots, they don't become big companies.
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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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... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
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Firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I think it is the worst.
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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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You don't need to make the structure complicated, in fact you shouldn't. All you need is for every employee to know who their manager is.
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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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Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.
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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
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Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.
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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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One thing that often disrupts momentum and really shouldn't is competitors.
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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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