Top 200 Sam Altman Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Why now, why is this the perfect time for this particular idea, and to start this particular company?”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

103. “In the beginning of a company, there is no management and this actually works really well.”

— Sam Altman

104. “Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven’t managed managers.”

— Sam Altman

105. “If someone is difficult to talk to, if someone cannot communicate clearly, it’s a real problem in terms of their likelihood to work out.”

— Sam Altman

106. “You should think about for the next 10 years, you’re going to be giving out 3-5% of the company every year.”

— Sam Altman

107. “Before 20 or 25 employees, most companies are structured with everyone reporting to the founder. It’s totally flat.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

109. “If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about, when you’re not trying to think about work.”

— Sam Altman

110. “Once your product is working, switch from not caring about this to caring about this a little bit.”

— Sam Altman

111. “Most things are not as risky as they seem.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

113. “Losing focus is another way that founders get off track.”

— Sam Altman

114. “It’s easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

117. “Why couldn’t it have been done 2 years ago, and why will 2 years in the future be too late?”

— Sam Altman

118. “You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.”

— Sam Altman

119. “By the way, that’s my number one piece of advice if you’re going to join a startup: pick a rocket ship.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

121. “You need to have a culture where people have very high quality standards in everything the company does, but still move quickly.”

— Sam Altman

122. “You need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done.”

— Sam Altman

123. “Many of the best YC companies have had phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders.”

— Sam Altman

124. “If you pivot, do it fully and with conviction. The worst thing is to try to do a bit of the old and the new-it’s hard to kill your babies.”

— Sam Altman

125. “A related advantage of mission oriented ideas, is that you yourself will be dedicated to them.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

127. “Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture.”

— Sam Altman

128. “In general don’t start a startup you’re not willing to work on for ten years.”

— Sam Altman

129. “1 of the hardest parts about being a founder, is that there are a 100 important things competing for your attention each day.”

— Sam Altman

130. “It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with.”

— Sam Altman

131. “The way you get deals done and the way you get good terms, is to have a competitive situation.”

— Sam Altman

132. “These all sounded really bad, but they turned out to be good. If they had sounded really good, there would have been too many people working on them.”

— Sam Altman

133. “Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.”

— Sam Altman

134. “When it comes to starting startups, in many ways, it’s easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

136. “Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well.”

— Sam Altman

137. “It’s difficult to get large groups of people, to the extreme levels of focus and productivity that you need, for a startup to be successful.”

— Sam Altman

138. “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.”

— Sam Altman

139. “Really dig into projects people have worked on and call references; that is another thing that first time founders like to skip.”

— Sam Altman

140. “People that are really smart and that can learn new things can almost always find a role in the company as time goes on.”

— Sam Altman

141. “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.”

— Sam Altman

142. “You have to let your team get all the credit for all the good stuff that happens, and you take responsibility for the bad stuff.”

— Sam Altman

143. “The thirteenth search engine- and without all the features of a web portal, most people thought that was pointless.”

— Sam Altman

144. “I prefer to invest in a company that’s going after a small but rapidly growing market than a big but slow growing one.”

— Sam Altman

145. “In YC’s case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.”

— Sam Altman

146. “Press releases are easier to write than code, and that is still easier than making a great product.”

— Sam Altman

147. “You have to be intense. This only comes from the CEO, this only comes from the founders.”

— Sam Altman

148. “You cannot create a market that doesn’t want to exist.”

— Sam Altman

149. “Startups are very hard no matter what you do; you may as well go after a big opportunity.”

— Sam Altman

150. “If you’re not in college and you don’t know a cofounder, the next best thing I think is to go work at an interesting company.”

— Sam Altman