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... you can think about that for everyone you hire: will I bet the future of this company on this single hire? And that's a tough bar.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Single
Team
Company
Future
Everyone
Think
Hire
Thinking
Bars
Tough

More quotes by Sam Altman

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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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Most investors are obsessed with the market size today and they don't think about how the market is going to evolve.
Sam Altman
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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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You can have a startup and one other thing, you can have a family, but you probably can't have many other things.
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... but actually it sucks to have a lot of employees, and you should be proud of how few employees you have.
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The hard part is that this is a very fine line. There's right on one side of it, and crazy on the other.
Sam Altman
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If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.
Sam Altman
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It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.
Sam Altman
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Unpopular but right is what you're going for.
Sam Altman
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If you pivot, do it fully and with conviction. The worst thing is to try to do a bit of the old and the new-it's hard to kill your babies.
Sam Altman
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Long term thinking is so rare anywhere, but especially in startups. This is a huge advantage if you do it.
Sam Altman
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Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.
Sam Altman
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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.
Sam Altman
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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.
Sam Altman
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You need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done.
Sam Altman
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The best people know that they should join a rocketship.
Sam Altman
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Why now, why is this the perfect time for this particular idea, and to start this particular company?
Sam Altman
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The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
Sam Altman
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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.
Sam Altman
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... you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.
Sam Altman