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The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Thing
Kills
Founders
Level
Levels
Giving

More quotes by Sam Altman

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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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You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.
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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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A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus.
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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 it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.
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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
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The second part of how to hire: try not to.
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... how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.
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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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... 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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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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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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The single word that matters most I think to keep the company productive as it grows is alignment.
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You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.
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The natural state of a start-up is to die most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.
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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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Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that's sort of just the sad reality.
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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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You want to sound crazy, but you want to actually be right.
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