Samuel H. "Sam" Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur, investor, programmer, and blogger. He is the president of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI.
In general, it's best if you're building something that you yourself need.
Don't let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.
You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.
As long as you keep doing the right thing and have the best product, you can beat the bigger company.
So it's worth some real up front time to think through the long term value and the defensibility of the business.
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.
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.
The biggest PR hack you can do, is not hire a PR firm.
You don't get to make their decisions but you do get to choose the decision makers.
If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.
Experience matters for some roles and not others.
For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups, it translates to don't let your ship date slip.
You want an idea about what you can say. I know it sounds like a bad idea but here's specifically why its actually a great one. You want to sound crazy but you want to ask to be right.
Unpopular but right is what you're going for.
We pretty much won't fund a company now where the founders don't have vested equity because it's just that hard to do.
There are exceptions of course, but most companies start with a great idea - not a pivot.
You never want to be in a place where an employee has vested 3 out of the 4 years of stock and they start thinking about leaving.
Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.
Because it's one of these sort of connections between nodes- every pair of people adds communication overhead.
Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven't managed managers.