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One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Thing
Retain
Employees
Hire
Founders
Employee
Team
Forget

More quotes by Sam Altman

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The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level.
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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 cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high.
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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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Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building, the ones that do have a huge advantage.
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In general, it's best if you're building something that you yourself need.
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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.
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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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So you should always stay on top of people's vesting schedules.
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Remember that the idea will expand, and become more ambitious as you go.
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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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Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.
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You have to let your team get all the credit for all the good stuff that happens, and you take responsibility for the bad stuff.
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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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... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
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A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus.
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You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.
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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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You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.
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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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