Sam Altman
The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.Collection: Ideas
The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Advice
Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first...at least 100 employees and often many more.Collection: Team
A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn't won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing.Collection: Team
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.Collection: Team
Firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I think it is the worst.Collection: Running
... fire fast when it's not working. It's better for the company, it's also better for the employee.Collection: Team
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.Collection: Team
You don't get to make their decisions but you do get to choose the decision makers.Collection: Team
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.Collection: Effort
People that are really smart and that can learn new things can almost always find a role in the company as time goes on.Collection: Team
One thing that often disrupts momentum and really shouldn't is competitors.Collection: Momentum
... but the pendulum has swung way out of whack here. A bad idea is still bad, and the pivot happy world we're in today feels suboptimal.Collection: Ideas
The cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high.Collection: Team
By the way, that's my number one piece of advice if you're going to join a startup: pick a rocket ship.Collection: Team
You're either not hiring at all or it's probably your single biggest block of time.Collection: Block
A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.Collection: Team
In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder.Collection: Team
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.Collection: Team
Stay focused and don't try to do too many things at once. Care about execution quality.Collection: Trying
Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.Collection: Exercise
You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.Collection: Team
Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.Collection: Ideas
Growth solves (nearly) all problemsCollection: Growth
AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.Collection: Team
The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.Collection: Team
You cannot create a market that doesn't want to exist.Collection: Want
You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.Collection: Team
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.Collection: Thinking
Every company has a rocky beginning.Collection: Company
You should always know how you're doing against your metrics. You should always have a weekly review meeting every week.Collection: Metrics
For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.Collection: Team
It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.Collection: Moving
... you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.Collection: Team
You need to have a culture where people have very high quality standards in everything the company does, but still move quickly.Collection: Moving
If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards.Collection: Feet
Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.Collection: Team
Investors will sort of like write the check and then, despite a lot of promises, don't usually do that much; sometimes they do.Collection: Team
Good startups usually take 10 years.Collection: Years
The second part of how to hire: try not to.Collection: Team
Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building, the ones that do have a huge advantage.Collection: Commitment
In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.Collection: Team
... but actually it sucks to have a lot of employees, and you should be proud of how few employees you have.Collection: Team
If someone is choosing between joining McKinsey or your startup it's very unlikely they're going to work out at the startup.Collection: Team
If it works out, you're going to be working on this for 10 years.Collection: Years
The thirteenth search engine- and without all the features of a web portal, most people thought that was pointless.Collection: People
It's better to have a few users love your product than for a lot of users to sort of like it.Collection: Love You