Sam Altman Quotes

More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.

It's better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it's still bad to be a solo founder.

Many of the best YC companies have had phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders.

In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.

Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.

One of the blessings I've had, really, for my entire career, is working with founders of companies, whether it was Bill Ziff at Ziff Davis or with Jerry Yang and David Filo at Yahoo.

My OkCupid co-founders are my best friends. We were in each other's weddings.

Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'

Founders need sizable egos to believe that what they are creating is good enough to change the world. What makes for great co-founders is having those egos focused on complementary, not competing, skills.

It turns out that one of the biggest drivers of investors are both successful and non-successful startup founders.

The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.

What great founders do is seek the networks that will be essential to their task... Usually it's best to have two or three people on a team rather than a solo founder.

Cofounders will endure so much together that their relationship is often compared to a marriage.

Mostly what I'm focused on is finding people who are younger who haven't built companies before but have a good idea.

I was one of the founders in, in that, the three of us all had the, had the founder's stock.

Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.

All of the development I do is with the help of business advisors who are more like my best friends than just business people. They helped me as I created Ipsy back in 2011, which is a beauty community that ships out sampling bags to subscribers.

I played with different words like 'home run,' 'megahit,' and they just all sounded kind of 'blah.' So I put in 'unicorn' because they are - these are very rare companies in the sense that there are thousands of startups in tech every year, and only a handful will wind up becoming a unicorn company. They're really rare.

I have seen a lot of now-great companies at their earliest stages, and these early-stage startups are not built by the senior people who know how to run and scale big-company machines.

For the first two years of Eventbrite, all the work was done by just the three founders: me, my husband, Kevin, and our chief technology officer, Renaud Visage.

For entrepreneurs, choosing your co-founders is like a professional marriage. You're going to go through tough times, and you need to remember that ideas can change, but business partners can't.

When Thomas and John Knoll launched Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, the software couldn't even handle color images. But their offerings got the startup noticed by Apple and Adobe, both of whom became key to the fledgling company's later success.

I said, 'Who said African American founders can't build a billion dollar company?'

By the way, that's my number one piece of advice if you're going to join a startup: pick a rocket ship.

Through crowdfunding anyone can find companies and products.Forming a partnership with innovative British businesses was appealing and the opportunity to go on a journey with these companies as they grow, and hopefully share in their future success, is exciting.