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Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Great
Product
Fit
Matters
Market
Build
Products
Jobs
Matter

More quotes by Sam Altman

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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 talk to say any of the first 40 or 50 employees, they all feel like they were a part of the founding of the company.
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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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Obsess about the quality of the product.
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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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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 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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If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.
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Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.
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... the thing we see wrong with YC apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first and what people want first.
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These all sounded really bad, but they turned out to be good. If they had sounded really good, there would have been too many people working on them.
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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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The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level.
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As you grow, it feels hopelessly corporate but it really is worth putting in place these compensation bands.
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Because it's one of these sort of connections between nodes- every pair of people adds communication overhead.
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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 addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder.
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Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.
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For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.
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