Samuel H. "Sam" Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur, investor, programmer, and blogger. He is the president of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI.
If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.
As you grow, it feels hopelessly corporate but it really is worth putting in place these compensation bands.
What you want to do is innovate on your product and your business model, management structure is not where I would try and innovate.
For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.
So you should always stay on top of people's vesting schedules.
The hard part is that this is a very fine line. There's right on one side of it, and crazy on the other.
Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that's sort of just the sad reality.
If someone is choosing between joining McKinsey or your startup it's very unlikely they're going to work out at the startup.
Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.
As you grow, the productivity I think, goes down with the square of the number of employees if you don't make an effort.
Employees will only add more value over time.
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.
Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large companies.
As long as you keep doing the right thing and have the best product, you can beat the bigger company.
A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
You cannot create a market that doesn't want to exist.
You also want people who are maniacally determined and that is slightly different than having a risk tolerant attitude.
Or a way to stay on strangers couches, that just sounds terrible all around.
Most good founders that I know at any given time have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows.
The most important thing is that there is clear reporting structure and everyone knows what it is.