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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.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Experience
Doesn
Matter
Much
Make
Hires
Aptitude
Early
Team

More quotes by Sam Altman

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The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
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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.
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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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Because it's one of these sort of connections between nodes- every pair of people adds communication overhead.
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If you want something in a deal, just ask for it.
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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.
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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.
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No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.
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You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.
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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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The cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high.
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You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.
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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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We talk to a team they've gotten new things done, that's the best predictor we have that a company will be successful.
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Growth solves (nearly) all problems
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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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... 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.
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Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.
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The most common post YC failure case for the companies we fund, is they're incredibly focussed during YC on their company... and after they start doing a lot of other things. They advise companies, they go to conferences, whatever.
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... how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.
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