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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Five
Fact
Often
Facts
Hire
Firsts
Mediocre
First
Kill
Single
Team

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The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
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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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The best people know that they should join a rocketship.
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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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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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In general, it's best if you're building something that you yourself need.
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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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The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.
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Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven't managed managers.
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You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.
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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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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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Most startups are not nearly focussed enough. They work hard...maybe, but they don't work hard on the right things.
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If it works out, you're going to be working on this for 10 years.
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Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.
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The biggest PR hack you can do, is not hire a PR firm.
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Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.
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Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.
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The natural state of a start-up is to die most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.
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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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