Here are favorite takeaways & quotes from Sam Altman interviews

It takes 10yrs to create a great startup. If you don’t love & believe it, you’ll likely give up at some point along the way. There’s no way I know of to get through the pain without a belief that the mission matters

On Risk:

Most people in the world will try to pull you back & say, ‘That seems a little too crazy'

At the end of the day, most ppl serve to pull you back towards the mean

Most ppl tend to either be wrong abt what is/isn’t risky or aren’t taking enough risks (especially early)

Most ppl are too risk-averse, and so most advice is biased too much towards conservative paths

Risk: Also, let’s re-define risk:

I think what risk actually looks like is not doing something that you will then spend the rest of your life regretting

It’s easy to spend a decade being busy & stressed every day, & feeling like you’re working hard and creating a ton of movement, but not moving forward.

Too many ppl get caught up in the idea of “working hard” w/o taking a pause to make sure they’re moving in the right direction.

Productivity:

This whole productivity porn thing where you have systems and multi-variable charts and 3-dimensional whatever, those people never seem to be the people that move the world forward

Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter.

The best ideas sound terrible at first

But this a good thing (it means there’s less competition)

Also, the truly good ideas don’t sound like they’re worth stealing (so don’t be afraid to share your idea with others)

The best ideas are usually either very different from existing companies in one meaningful way or totally new

If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you’re doing, it’s almost always a sign that it’s too complicated

People use employee count as a metric for startup success—this is wrong

You should instead be proud of how few employees you have. Lots of employees equals a high burn rate—meaning you’re losing lots of money every month, complexity, tension, and slow decision-making

Mediocre people at a big company cause some problems—they don’t usually kill the company. 

A single mediocre hire out of your first five will often, in fact, kill a startup

With every early hire, ask: “Am I willing to bet the future of the company on this one hire?

Qualities in team:

Optimists: The whole world will be telling you why you’re going to fail as a startup. You need that internal fire of belief

Idea Generators: Can generate solutions to solve problems

“I’ve Got It”: Ppl on your team who are always willing to step up to the job

"People that run companies are either a good leader or a good manager. I think I’m a good leader and a bad manager."

I think the best thing you can do is realize that, as a first-time founder, you’re likely to be a terrible manager, & then try to overcompensate for that

Being super generous with early employee equity, and getting founder-quality people as the first 10 employees, I think all the evidence is on the side of doing this, and yet, almost no one does.

There’s a huge edge if you’re willing to do it.

5 Jobs of a Startup CEO:

- Set the vision
- Raise money
- Evangelize
- Hire & manage
- Make sure the entire company executes

As a founder, you’ll have 100s of important things competing for your attention—your job is to identify the most critical, work on them, & defer the rest

On Evangelism:

Someone at the startup must be able to recruit, sell the product, talk to the press, raise money, etc.

This requires someone who can affect the whole world with enthusiasm about what the company’s trying to do

You want a company to be winning all the time. If you ever take the foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control and snowball downwards. A winning team feels good and keeps winning; a team that hasn’t won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing.

Keep momentum!

How to keep momentum:

Establish an operating rhythm—ship product and launch new features weekly

Ignore competitors (until they’re beating you with a shipped product)

Competitors making noise is often what crushes a company’s momentum more than any external factor

The number 1 lesson startups need is that the degree to which you’re successful approximates the degree to which you build a product that’s so good, ppl spontaneously tell their friends abt it

Ppl are more likely to tell their friends abt a product when it’s easy to explain

Real Trends vs. Fake Trends

With real trends, a new piece of tech comes along, & the early adopters use it obsessively (and tell their friends how much they love it) (e.g iPhone)

A fake trend is one where people may buy the product, but don’t use it all that often (e.g. oculus)

"I learn pretty well by reading, but I learn much better by talking to the experts"

If you send a thoughtful email, one that shows you’re serious and have done some work, to somebody working at the edge of a particular field on something interesting, they’ll probably meet you.

Not only do I think it’s possible to start a hard tech startup, it’s actually easier to start a hard startup than it is to start an easier startup. 

If you’re doing something that makes people’s eyes gloss over, it’s hard to hire, it’s hard to stake holders to care, etc

Almost every VC firm gives advice they never follow themselves:

They don’t build differentiated products, they are not network affected businesses, they don’t try to build a brand and a community, and they don’t try to make something that gets better the bigger it gets

I think one thing that is an important thing to strive for is being internally driven, being driven to compete with yourself, not with other people. If you compete with other people, you end up in this mimetic trap, and you sort of play this tournament, and if you win, you lose

When to pivot?

When you’ve run out of ideas AND something isn’t working, then it’s a good time to stop

Most great companies start with a great idea, not a pivot. If you look at the track record of pivots, they don’t usually become big companies.

Nuclear Energy, why is it unpopular?

Bc most ppl are bad at estimating risk. They'll happily breathe in coal smoke all day & then someday die of cancer, & not connect that together. But if there’s a nuclear meltdown & 3 people die, they will march against nuclear energy forever

If you work hard at the beginning of your career, & you get a little better at what you do every day, every week, every year, & learn more, & meet more people, & get more done, there's a compound effect. It’s better to put that time in at the beginning of your career than the end