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Portrait of Sam Altman

Sam Altman

(1985) Businessperson

235 quotes in 581 categories

Sam Altman says the best people jump on a rocketship and stay close to their co‑founders for years. He stresses that a startup grows by improving its product and that a winning team keeps winning while a losing team loses motivation. He also warns that hiring is a huge time drain and that founders who quit are the biggest threat to a company.

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Sam Altman is a businessperson.

Quick Facts About Sam Altman

Born: April 22, 1985
Profession: Businessperson

About Sam Altman

Sam Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor who has been the CEO of OpenAI since 2019.

Quotes by Sam Altman

Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.

Diplomat

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Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere.

Execution

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Employees will only add more value over time.

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Losing focus is another way that founders get off track.

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The idea should come first, the startup should come second.

Customer

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You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.

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If you want something in a deal, just ask for it.

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Obsess about the quality of the product.

Excellence

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The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.

Good ideas

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As you grow, the productivity I think, goes down with the square of the number of employees if you don't make an…

Effort

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Firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I think it is the…

Business

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A lot of people treat choosing their cofounder with even less importance than they put on hiring. Don't do this.

Customer

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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…

Business

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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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You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.

Fire

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If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.

Compromise

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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…

Advice

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You want an idea about what you can say. I know it sounds like a bad idea but here's specifically why its…

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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…

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You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best…

Best company

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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…

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One of the keys to focus, and why I said cofounders that aren't friends really struggle, is that you can't be focused…

Communication

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We've seen a lot of data at YC now, and the most successful companies and the ones where the investors do the…

Company

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Study the unusually successful people you know, and you will find them imbued with enthusiasm for their work which is contagious. Not…

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You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.

Entrepreneurship

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Unpopular but right is what you're going for.

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At YC we have this public phrase, and it's relentlessly resourceful.

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If it works out, you're going to be working on this for 10 years.

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The best people know that they should join a rocketship.

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So you should always stay on top of people's vesting schedules.

People

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No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.

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You cannot create a market that doesn't want to exist.

Creativity

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You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.

Change

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You can't be focussed without really great communication

Communication

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The biggest PR hack you can do, is not hire a PR firm.

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Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large companies.

Advantage

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Experience matters for some roles and not others.

Experience

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The startups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.

Entrepreneurship

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You want to sound crazy, but you want to actually be right.

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The second part of how to hire: try not to.

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Sam Altman by topic

Team (67) Customer (55) Entrepreneurship (54) Company (48) Business (39) People (32) Founders (31) Employee (27) Ideas (23) Time (21) Startup (20) Thinking (19) Investing (17)