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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
Best
Need
Needs
Something
General
Building

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If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.
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The cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high.
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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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One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.
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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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You should always know how you're doing against your metrics. You should always have a weekly review meeting every week.
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One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them.
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Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that's sort of just the sad reality.
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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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Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.
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Most startups are not nearly focussed enough. They work hard...maybe, but they don't work hard on the right things.
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So you should always stay on top of people's vesting schedules.
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You think you have this great idea that everyone's going to come join, but that's not how it works.
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... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
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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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If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.
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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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