Words matter. These are the best Sam Altman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Background updating is absolutely the future.
The market for local advertising is in the billions.
Startups on the inside are always badly broken.
One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.
The only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you’re making sufficiently good.
Technology magnifies differences, and it’s been replacing or obviating jobs for a long time. But what happens as that case accelerates? I’m not one of these doomsayers who says, ‘There will be no jobs.’
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.
For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn’t matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.
Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large competitors.
The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world.
Don’t hire for the sake of hiring. Hire because there is no other way to do what you want to do.
The way to really scale a venture firm is with software.
One of the things we urge Y-Combinator companies to do is to have profitability in grasp. If you need to get profitable before your A round of money, you ought to be able to do that.
Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.
If you ask a founder how their company is doing, they always say, ‘Oh it’s great. We’re totally crushing it,’ and that’s almost never true.
I suppose if I didn’t have Loopt, I’d have to, I don’t know, pick up the phone and just start calling people, a lot more texting and certainly more Googling.
There’s this famous observation that I totally believe: Great startup ideas are the ones that lie in the intersection of the Venn diagram of ‘is a good idea’ and ‘looks like a bad idea.’ So you want most people to think it’s a bad idea and thus not compete with you until you get giant. But for it to secretly be good.
The nice thing about Reddit is, we don’t have to sell your data or build a profile of you or do stuff that makes people feel uncomfortable.
People always make the mistake of calling an idea small or stupid because they don’t understand how it’s going to evolve.
What is OK is to spend money for productivity. What is not OK is just to light money on fire.
Intelligence is usually easy to tell in a 10-minute conversation. Determination is harder.
It’s easy to say, ‘I’m going to build something that already exists,’ but it’s difficult to clearly and succinctly describe something new.
Sometimes people think Y Combinator has big ideas about themes. But really, we just fund the best startups.
I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they’ll go on to greatness, or maybe they’ll never get off the runway at all.
With Loopt Star, consumers get to tap interactive rewards wherever they may be.
It’s so important for startups to get their culture right at the start. They need to feel unique and that they are on their own important mission in the world.
The way to build billion dollar companies is to first build something people love. There isn’t really a shortcut there.
Do I think every culture will embrace location technology? Yes.
Very ambitious startups often take a long time to work – or sometimes they take a very long time to look ambitious.
Don’t let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.
Asking what I’d do without Loopt is almost like asking what I would do if I didn’t have a smartphone because the feature set has become the norm for me.
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.
Check-ins are cool, but kind of a pain.
If you compromise and hire someone mediocre, you will always regret it.
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.
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.
All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.
A lot of people don’t love their bank.
I think the mistake people make most often when they invest in other kinds of startups is they say, ‘This is totally different.’ And so the things that matter, like making a product that people desperately want, like talking to customers, they throw this out the window. That is a recipe for heartache and tears.
Seed investing is the status symbol of Silicon Valley. Most people don’t want Ferraris, they want a winning seed investment.
Everyone is looking for the hack, the secret to success without hard work.
Virgin America flyers tend to be more likely to be using a mobile device and tapping social networks – even at 35,000 feet.
Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I’d say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies – and I’ve observed a lot now – don’t do a very good job of that.
People hate searching.
The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.
Loopt isn’t a service that keeps you locked in, staring at your screen.
Whoever Boost works with, Sprint will work with. And whoever Sprint works with, Verizon and AT&T will as well.
I think that inexpensive sources of planet-friendly energy are one of the most important things for us to pursue.
The biggest part of Loopt is about discovering the world around you, never replacing a social experience – only adding to it.
I don’t think people spend nearly enough time thinking about what they like and what they’re good at.
Location is the sole difference between mobile and traditional Web.
Tech companies tend to do tech best.
Maybe I am a bit unusual here, but I am less stressed if I have my phone with me. Because I can spend like an hour in the morning taking care of everything instead of I sit there and wonder what I missed or wonder what’s happening. So it’s way less stressful for me to just answer my phone.
The correlation of quality of life and cost of energy is huge.
Many founders hire just because it seems like a cool thing to do, and people always ask how many employees you have.
Loopt wouldn’t have happened without Y Combinator.
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 have the opportunity to go be an early employee at a company that’s just going crazy, and you believe it’s the next Facebook or Google, you should go join that company.
I believe whatever smart, ambitious people are working on will be the trend of the future. I do think that it’s worth thinking critically about what the future will be.
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.
I grew up with a computer, and many of my friends were people I met online.
People appreciate when you make an effort to speak their language.
Traditional local advertising is not what retailers want. They want not just for you to see an ad – they want you to come into the store, to be a repeat customer and to spread the word.
Anonymity breeds meanness.
Companies generally work better when they are smaller. It’s always worth spending time to think about the least amount of projects/work you can feasibly do, and then having as small a team as possible to do it.
I don’t often get involved with campaigns at all.
