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.
The best people know that they should join a rocketship.
Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.
In general though, if you look at the track record of pivots, they don't become big companies.
When it comes to starting startups, in many ways, it's easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup.
The cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high.
What you want to do is innovate on your product and your business model, management structure is not where I would try and innovate.
Great execution is at least 10 times more important and a 100 times harder than a good idea.
Unpopular but right is what you're going for.
No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.
. . . for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
The thirteenth search engine- and without all the features of a web portal, most people thought that was pointless.
Most of the best hires that I've made in my entire life have never done that thing before.
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.
So you should always stay on top of people's vesting schedules.
I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.
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.
You want to think about what is the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows.
Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that's going to be what the whole company focusses on.
As you grow, the productivity I think, goes down with the square of the number of employees if you don't make an effort.
A related advantage of mission oriented ideas, is that you yourself will be dedicated to them.