A biography for Sam Altmanhasn’t been written yet.
“That culture of frugality and discipline is really important for the Y Combinator mindset.”
“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.”
“A lot of people don't love their bank.”
“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.”
“The whole concept of rewarding customers is a big trend.”
“The only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you're making sufficiently good.”
“The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.”
“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.”
“Check-ins are cool, but kind of a pain.”
“Very ambitious startups often take a long time to work - or sometimes they take a very long time to look ambitious.”
“Loopt wouldn't have happened without Y Combinator.”
“With Loopt Star, consumers get to tap interactive rewards wherever they may be.”
“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.”
“The start-ups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.”
“Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.”
“The reduction in compassion that happens when we're all behind computer screens is not good for the world.”
“People always make the mistake of calling an idea small or stupid because they don't understand how it's going to evolve.”
“Don't let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.”
“The way to really scale a venture firm is with software.”
“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.”