Quotes from Sam Altman

I think you can say a lot of evil behavior by companies is short-term optimization.

For early employees you want people that have somewhat of a risk-taking attitude.

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.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It's easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.

If you have several ideas that all seem pretty good, work on the one that you think about, when you're not trying to think about work.

If you're not in college and you don't know a cofounder, the next best thing I think is to go work at an interesting company.

One of the pieces of advice that we give at YC is: try to work together on a project rather than just doing an interview.

The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level.

The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. They get things done really quickly.

So it's worth some real up front time to think through the long term value and the defensibility of the business.

The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.

Very ambitious startups often take a long time to work - or sometimes they take a very long time to look ambitious.

A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus.

Because it's one of these sort of connections between nodes- every pair of people adds communication overhead.

In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.

Don't let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.

Do I think every culture will embrace location technology? Yes.

I really believe that the single hardest thing in business is building a company that does repeatable innovation... and just has this ongoing culture of excellence as it grows.

Firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I think it is the worst.

... you can think about that for everyone you hire: will I bet the future of this company on this single hire? And that's a tough bar.

Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that's going to be what the whole company focusses on.