Top 200 Sam Altman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Stay focused and don’t try to do too many things at once. Care about execution quality.”

— Sam Altman

2. “It’s better to have a few users love your product than for a lot of users to sort of like it.”

— Sam Altman

3. “You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.”

— Sam Altman

4. “If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards.”

— Sam Altman

5. “AirBnB happened because Brian Chesky couldn’t pay his rent, but did have some space.”

— Sam Altman

6. “One of the biggest advantages that start ups have is execution speed, and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

9. “There are 3 things I look for when I hire people. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

11. “Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you’ll probably end up in a pretty good place.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

13. “You can win with the best product, the best price, or the best experience.”

— Sam Altman

14. “Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.”

— Sam Altman

15. “A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn’t won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing.”

— Sam Altman

16. “As long as you keep doing the right thing and have the best product, you can beat the bigger company.”

— Sam Altman

17. “You should always know how you’re doing against your metrics. You should always have a weekly review meeting every week.”

— Sam Altman

18. “At YC we have this public phrase, and it’s relentlessly resourceful.”

— Sam Altman

19. “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

20. “The most important thing is that there is clear reporting structure and everyone knows what it is.”

— Sam Altman

21. “Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.”

— Sam Altman

22. “The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level.”

— Sam Altman

23. “You’ll get more support on a hard, important, project than a derivative one.”

— Sam Altman

24. “Obsess about the quality of the product.”

— Sam Altman

25. “The company just needs to see you as like this maniacal execution machine.”

— Sam Altman

26. “The single word that matters most I think to keep the company productive as it grows is alignment.”

— Sam Altman

27. “Good startups usually take 10 years.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

29. “Unpopular but right is what you’re going for.”

— Sam Altman

30. “A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus...”

— Sam Altman

31. “Starting a business is like riding a wave between life and death. If you can hang on long enough, you’re bound to succeed.”

— Sam Altman

32. “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

33. “I think the best thing you can do is be aware that as a first time founder you are likely to be a very bad manager.”

— Sam Altman

34. “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.”

— Sam Altman

35. “I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

37. “Experience matters for some roles and not others.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

39. “So always keep momentum, it’s this prime directive for managing a startup.”

— Sam Altman

40. “When lack of structure fails, it fails all at once. What works totally fine from 0-20 employees, is disastrous at 30.”

— Sam Altman

41. “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

42. “You’re saying no ninety-seven times out of a hundred, and most founders find they have to make a very conscious effort to do this.”

— Sam Altman

43. “Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

45. “It takes years and years, usually a decade, to create a great startup.”

— Sam Altman

46. “A board member of mine used to say sales fix everything in a startup, and that is really true.”

— Sam Altman

47. “If you look at successful pivots, they almost always are a pivot into something that the founder wanted. Not a random made up idea.”

— Sam Altman

48. “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

49. “You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly, and then quickly expand.”

— Sam Altman

50. “The tenth social network, and limited only to college students with no money, also terrible. Myspace had won.”

— Sam Altman