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In general, it's best if you're building something that you yourself need.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Building
Best
Need
Needs
Something
General

More quotes by Sam Altman

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The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself.
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So it's worth some real up front time to think through the long term value and the defensibility of the business.
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You certainly don't need to have everything figured out in the path from here to world domination.
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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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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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One thing I tell startups all the time is that the best way to grow is to make their product better.
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You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.
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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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When it comes to starting startups, in many ways, it's easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup.
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Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.
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You need to have a culture where people have very high quality standards in everything the company does, but still move quickly.
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The startups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.
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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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Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you'll probably end up in a pretty good place.
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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
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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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Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that's going to be what the whole company focusses on.
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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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... 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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... how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.
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