Sam Altman
Sam Altman
Samuel H. "Sam" Altmanis an American entrepreneur, programmer, venture capitalist and blogger. He is the president of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
CountryUnited States of America
cool founders hire people seems
Many founders hire just because it seems like a cool thing to do, and people always ask how many employees you have.
location sole
Location is the sole difference between mobile and traditional Web.
bad compete diagram famous good great ideas lie people secretly thus totally until
There's this famous observation that I totally believe: Great startup ideas are the ones that lie in the intersection of the Venn diagram of 'is a good idea' and 'looks like a bad idea.' So you want most people to think it's a bad idea and thus not compete with you until you get giant. But for it to secretly be good.
great
If you have a startup that's keeping it up at night because you think it's so great, then you should do that.
almost ask crushing founder great totally
If you ask a founder how their company is doing, they always say, 'Oh it's great. We're totally crushing it,' and that's almost never true.
android iphone large people quite
If you look at people who have an iPhone or Android and are under 40 and are dissatisfied with their bank, it's actually quite a large market.
believe company early employee facebook join next opportunity
If you have the opportunity to go be an early employee at a company that's just going crazy, and you believe it's the next Facebook or Google, you should go join that company.
If you go to a paintball subreddit, paintball companies can advertise to you.
determination intelligence
Intelligence is usually easy to tell in a 10-minute conversation. Determination is harder.
capital easy either figure good money needs offering raise
Generally, you want to raise capital either when you have to or when it's really easy. If the company desperately needs money, and they can't figure out any other way, then they need to raise money. Or if someone's offering you easy money on good terms, you should take it because you can use it for good things.
cost life
The correlation of quality of life and cost of energy is huge.
buy manage unheard
If you wanted to build an Internet startup in 2005, you had to buy your own servers and hire someone to manage it. Now, that's unheard of.
finally force harness people understand
The crowd's a really powerful force on the Internet, and people finally understand how to harness that.
business critical figuring five hard hundred ignoring matters rest running
The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.