Sam Altman Quotes

... fire fast when it's not working. It's better for the company, it's also better for the employee.

Drive your business. Let not your business drive you.

When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.

When I got to the Mavericks people were all giving me advice - change this, change that - and one thing that I didn't do was fire anybody.

We were a fast-growing company, and I was a demanding boss.

The classic problem as an entrepreneur is that they have a hard time delegating. But that's really crazy. Recruiting other executives is critical, so is dealing with customers and dealing with regulators. Those are functions that only the top founders can do.

I like being part of a big company's executive team. It's fun to stretch other parts of my brain, considering questions like, 'How should we think of acquisitions?' I get to be privy to things that would never come up at a small company.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

Don't be afraid to let someone go if it's not working. You're not a bad boss. You're not a bad CEO.

If there's a big problem and you've got the right people with you, usually the answer emerges and you do what's the obvious thing to do. I don't think of myself as some great manager or great leader. I've been very lucky to be in the positions that I've been in. I meet a lot of people and I've grown a lot of companies, and I meet a lot of CEOs at big enterprises. I'm always so surprised at how much they seem to know. It doesn't always seem to be correlated to how well they actually do.

In the beginning of a company, there is no management and this actually works really well.

Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.

Building a product is easy. But building the company that builds the product is hard.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.

You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.

As a founder you have to build a team some day, so why not start the day you found the company?

I can help someone grow their business 130% in 12 to 18 months only because I've done that with so many of my own and have faced so many challenges.

Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven't managed managers.

Running a business is not the same as being president of the United States.

I think going public should not be a goal and the more that we make it a goal, the less it will be a goal. It's kind of like, I have three young children and when I tell them to eat vegetables, the last thing they will ever do is eat vegetables. I think it's just this weird thing where entrepreneurs have a reflexive negative reaction when people are pushing for it. I think you have to view going public for what it is, which is a transitional moment where you can consolidate mindshare and win at an even larger scale.

A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.

When I was a kid I started a baseball team. I was a terrible player, but I put together a group of neighborhood kids. I started a hockey team. I put the kids together and got a sponsor. So I can always kind of organize people and get things done.

I have this amazing team that I trust. I completely go with their decisions on things. I don't have to go in and micromanage everything. And I think the other thing is, you start to sort of... I wouldn't say relax, because I've never relaxed. But I've tried to have more confidence in the things I like, or the things other people like. That's really the big thing in this job, to second-guess yourself all the time.

What being a founder means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution - and you can't outsource this.

As much as you need a strong personality to build a business from scratch, you also must understand the art of delegation.