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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
Matters
Market
Build
Products
Jobs
Matter
Great
Product
Fit

More quotes by Sam Altman

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The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.
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Most good founders that I know at any given time have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows.
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Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It's easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.
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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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You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.
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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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The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
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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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... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
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In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.
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The single word that matters most I think to keep the company productive as it grows is alignment.
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If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about, when you're not trying to think about work.
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You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.
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Remember that the idea will expand, and become more ambitious as you go.
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Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well.
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You cannot create a market that doesn't want to exist.
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Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.
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Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.
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The most common post YC failure case for the companies we fund, is they're incredibly focussed during YC on their company... and after they start doing a lot of other things. They advise companies, they go to conferences, whatever.
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Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.
Sam Altman