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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.

Sam Altman

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Sam Altman
Age: 39
Born: 1985
Born: April 22
Entrepreneur
Chicago
Illinois
Samuel H. Altman
Samuel Altman
Roles
Tries
Clear
Boards
Ends
Disaster
Doe
Lays
Trying
Strategy
Role
Ceo
Advice
Consent
Usually
Board

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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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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If it works out, you're going to be working on this for 10 years.
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Most of the best hires that I've made in my entire life have never done that thing before.
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... and you can only have 2 or 3 things everyday, because everything else will just come at you you know fires in a day.
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One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them.
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To get the very best people- they have a lot of great options, and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone.
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You have to save the vision speeches for when the company is winning. When you're not winning, you just have to get momentum back.
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In the beginning of a company, there is no management and this actually works really well.
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Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.
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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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So you should always stay on top of people's vesting schedules.
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You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.
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Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.
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Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.
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If someone is getting every decision wrong, that's when you need to act, and at that point it'll be painfully aware to everyone.
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You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.
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You cannot create a market that doesn't want to exist.
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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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In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.
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