Top 200 Sam Altman Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “If you can just learn to think about the market first, you will have a big leg up on most people starting startups.”

— Sam Altman

153. “Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they’re building, the ones that do have a huge advantage.”

— Sam Altman

154. “What you want to do is innovate on your product and your business model, management structure is not where I would try and innovate.”

— Sam Altman

155. “You don’t need to make the structure complicated, in fact you shouldn’t. All you need is for every employee to know who their manager is.”

— Sam Altman

156. “You don’t get to make their decisions but you do get to choose the decision makers.”

— Sam Altman

157. “Or a way to stay on strangers couches, that just sounds terrible all around.”

— Sam Altman

158. “Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

160. “As you grow, it feels hopelessly corporate but it really is worth putting in place these compensation bands.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

164. “So it’s worth some real up front time to think through the long term value and the defensibility of the business.”

— Sam Altman

165. “Just put a little pin in your mind: when you cross 50 employees, there are a new set of HR rules that you have to comply with.”

— Sam Altman

166. “The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.”

— Sam Altman

167. “At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.”

— Sam Altman

168. “Some day everyone will find out everyone else’s comp, if it’s all over the place, it will be a complete meltdown disaster.”

— Sam Altman

169. “You certainly don’t need to have everything figured out in the path from here to world domination.”

— Sam Altman

170. “As the company grows and about this 25 or so employee size, your main job shifts from building a great product to building a great company.”

— Sam Altman

171. “You should be giving out a lot of equity to your employees.”

— Sam Altman

172. “Don’t let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.”

— Sam Altman

173. “It’s become popular in recent years to say that the idea doesn’t matter.”

— Sam Altman

174. “I myself used to believe ideas didn’t matter that much, but I’m very sure that’s wrong now.”

— Sam Altman

175. “You think you have this great idea that everyone’s going to come join, but that’s not how it works.”

— Sam Altman

176. “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

177. “Most of the best hires that I’ve made in my entire life have never done that thing before.”

— Sam Altman

178. “The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself.”

— Sam Altman

179. “Employees will only add more value over time.”

— Sam Altman

180. “You never want to be in a place where an employee has vested 3 out of the 4 years of stock and they start thinking about leaving.”

— Sam Altman

181. “Remember that the idea will expand, and become more ambitious as you go.”

— Sam Altman

182. “Every company has a rocky beginning.”

— Sam Altman

183. “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.”

— Sam Altman

184. “One of the pieces of advice that we give at YC is: try to work together on a project rather than just doing an interview.”

— Sam Altman

185. “You want to think about what is the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows.”

— Sam Altman

186. “I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees.”

— Sam Altman

187. “You want to continue to be run by great products, not process for it’s own sake.”

— Sam Altman

188. “Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.”

— Sam Altman

189. “Investors will sort of like write the check and then, despite a lot of promises, don’t usually do that much; sometimes they do.”

— Sam Altman

190. “Because it’s one of these sort of connections between nodes- every pair of people adds communication overhead.”

— Sam Altman

191. “The second part of how to hire: try not to.”

— Sam Altman

192. “Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that’s going to be what the whole company focusses on.”

— Sam Altman

193. “You can’t be focussed without really great communication.”

— Sam Altman

194. “The track record for founders that don’t already know each other is really bad.”

— Sam Altman

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

— Sam Altman

196. “In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.”

— Sam Altman

197. “You’re either not hiring at all or it’s probably your single biggest block of time.”

— Sam Altman

198. “Founders that are hard to talk to are almost always bad.”

— Sam Altman

199. “A successful startup takes a very long time – certainly much longer than most founders think at the outset. You cannot treat it as an all-nighter. You have to eat well, sleep well, and exercise. You have to spend time with your family and friends. You also need to work in an area you’re actually passionate about – nothing else will sustain you for ten years.”

— Sam Altman

200. “Remember that you are more likely to die because you execute badly than get crushed by a competitor.”

— Sam Altman