Sam Altman Founder Quotations

If a company is profitable, the founder is in control. If it's not, investors are in control.

There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things. Founders are able to set the vision for their companies with an authority no one else can.

Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture.

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.

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

Before 20 or 25 employees, most companies are structured with everyone reporting to the founder. It's totally flat.

In the early days of a startup, people's compensation is whatever you negotiate with a founder and it's all over the place.

We hear again and again from founders, that they wish they had waited to start a startup until they came up with an idea they really loved.

The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. They get things done really quickly.

You have to be intense. This only comes from the CEO, this only comes from the founders.

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

Most good founders that I know at any given time have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows.

Many founders hire just because it seems like a cool thing to do, and people always ask how many employees you have.

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.

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.

One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.