Quotes from Sam Altman

People hate searching.

I always tell my partners that our job is to fund all the companies we can that can be worth $10 billion or more. That's such a difficult constraint, we can't have any other constraints.

A lot of people don't love their bank.

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.

The way to build billion dollar companies is to first build something people love. There isn't really a shortcut there.

The market for local advertising is in the billions.

Anonymity breeds meanness.

There is a lot of stuff I like. I love backpacking. I love going to an island where I can just sit on the beach and read or scuba dive and sail. I do a lot of that. I still go backpacking around Europe in the summers and staying in hostels. I love that.

I wouldn't call Loopt a failure. It didn't turn out like I wanted, for sure, but it was fun, I learned a lot, and I made enough money to start investing, which led me to my current job. I don't regret it at all.

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.

I don't often get involved with campaigns at all.

The tenth social network, and limited only to college students with no money, also terrible. Myspace had won.

Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you'll probably end up in a pretty good place.

A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn't won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing.

One of the keys to focus, and why I said cofounders that aren't friends really struggle, is that you can't be focused without good communication.

The best ideas often look terrible at the beginning the truly good ideas, don't seem like they're worth stealing.

There are exceptions of course, but most companies start with a great idea - not a pivot.

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.

AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.

The only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you're making sufficiently good.

Location is the sole difference between mobile and traditional Web.

If the Reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website, but it will never be a truly great community.

The crowd's a really powerful force on the Internet, and people finally understand how to harness that.

Intelligence is usually easy to tell in a 10-minute conversation. Determination is harder.