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I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Thinking
Aim
Team
Company
Give
Firsts
Estimate
First
Employees
Giving
Employee
Think
Rough

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Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large companies.
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You want to sound crazy, but you want to actually be right.
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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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You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.
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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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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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If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.
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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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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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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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Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.
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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
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When lack of structure fails, it fails all at once. What works totally fine from 0-20 employees, is disastrous at 30.
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You should think about for the next 10 years, you're going to be giving out 3-5% of the company every year.
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The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself.
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Developing a personal connection with anyone you're trying to do a big deal with is really important.
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