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Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.
Sam Altman
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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Employee
Generous
Totally
Stingy
Usually
Equity
Team
Employees
Think
Founders
Thinking
Backwards
Investors
More quotes by Sam Altman
It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.
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In general, it's best if you're building something that you yourself need.
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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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... fire fast when it's not working. It's better for the company, it's also better for the employee.
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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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If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.
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Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.
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What being a founder means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution - and you can't outsource this.
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You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.
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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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So always keep momentum, it's this prime directive for managing a startup.
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I really believe that the single hardest thing in business is building a company that does repeatable innovation... and just has this ongoing culture of excellence as it grows.
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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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Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.
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For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups, it translates to don't let your ship date slip.
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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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Long term thinking is so rare anywhere, but especially in startups. This is a huge advantage if you do it.
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If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.
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Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. Not to hire.
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Why now, why is this the perfect time for this particular idea, and to start this particular company?
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