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
deeply either immersed life running throughout
All throughout my life I have been deeply immersed in startups, either because I was running one or investing in them or helping them.
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.
running team thinking
Firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I think it is the worst.
running want sake
You want to continue to be run by great products, not process for it's own sake.
mission
It's so important for startups to get their culture right at the start. They need to feel unique and that they are on their own important mission in the world.
biggest experience
The biggest part of Loopt is about discovering the world around you, never replacing a social experience - only adding to it.
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.
cost life
The correlation of quality of life and cost of energy is huge.
lose model money plenty
I have plenty of investments that I wish I'd never made. But the model is to lose money on a lot of investments and then make 1,000X or 10,000X on an investment.
early love maybe outcome runway stage
I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they'll go on to greatness, or maybe they'll never get off the runway at all.
family handful hundred low prefer priority
Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.
consumers tap
With Loopt Star, consumers get to tap interactive rewards wherever they may be.
light money ok spend
What is OK is to spend money for productivity. What is not OK is just to light money on fire.
companies facebook good google hit incredible job observed public standing terrible
Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.