Sam Altman Quotes About Team
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There are 3 things I look for when I hire people. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?
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In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.
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You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.
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Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.
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... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
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The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
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... We probably funded a rate of something like one out of ten solo teams.
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Employees will only add more value over time.
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Many of the best YC companies have had phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders.
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The best source by far for hiring is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know.
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If someone is choosing between joining McKinsey or your startup it's very unlikely they're going to work out at the startup.
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A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
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You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.
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Really dig into projects people have worked on and call references; that is another thing that first time founders like to skip.
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AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.
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You don't get to make their decisions but you do get to choose the decision makers.
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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.
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One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.
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Experience matters for some roles and not others.
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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.
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Firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I think it is the worst.
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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.
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I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees.
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In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.
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Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.
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You're either not hiring at all or it's probably your single biggest block of time.
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If someone is getting every decision wrong, that's when you need to act, and at that point it'll be painfully aware to everyone.
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At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.
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The best people know that they should join a rocketship.
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You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.
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