Team Quotes by Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

Employees will only add more value over time.

— Sam Altman

The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder.

— Sam Altman

You're either not hiring at all or it's probably your single biggest block of time.

— Sam Altman

For early employees you want people that have somewhat of a risk-taking attitude.

— Sam Altman

The best people know that they should join a rocketship.

— Sam Altman

... if you talk to say any of the first 40 or 50 employees, they all feel like they were a part…

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

People that are really smart and that can learn new things can almost always find a role in the company as time…

— Sam Altman

Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not…

— Sam Altman

One of the pieces of advice that we give at YC is: try to work together on a project rather than just…

— Sam Altman

If someone is choosing between joining McKinsey or your startup it's very unlikely they're going to work out at the startup.

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

... how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.

— Sam Altman

The cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high.

— Sam Altman

One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them.

— Sam Altman

... fire fast when it's not working. It's better for the company, it's also better for the employee.

— Sam Altman

Companies that I've been very involved with, that have had a very bad first hire in the first 3 or so employees…

— Sam Altman

AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.

— Sam Altman

No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.

— Sam Altman

Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first...at least 100 employees and often many more.

— Sam Altman

You need someone that behaves like James Bond more than you need someone that is an expert in some particular domain.

— Sam Altman

It's better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it's still bad to be a solo founder.

— Sam Altman

Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.

— Sam Altman

The best source by far for hiring is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already…

— Sam Altman

We pretty much won't fund a company now where the founders don't have vested equity because it's just that hard to do.

— Sam Altman

A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn't won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing.

— Sam Altman

You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.

— Sam Altman

A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.

— Sam Altman

If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.

— Sam Altman

In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.

— Sam Altman

Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.

— Sam Altman

... We probably funded a rate of something like one out of ten solo teams.

— Sam Altman

Experience matters for some roles and not others.

— Sam Altman