A biography for Sam Altmanhasn’t been written yet.
“Don't hire for the sake of hiring. Hire because there is no other way to do what you want to do.”
“If you go to a paintball subreddit, paintball companies can advertise to you.”
“Ideas are cheap and easy, and there are a lot of them.”
“Many of the companies in the mobile location space are trying to figure out different ways to tie what they're doing to commerce.”
“One of the things we urge Y-Combinator companies to do is to have profitability in grasp. If you need to get profitable before your A round of money, you ought to be able to do that.”
“The correlation of quality of life and cost of energy is huge.”
“Intelligence is usually easy to tell in a 10-minute conversation. Determination is harder.”
“Tech companies tend to do tech best.”
“I wouldn't call Loopt a failure. It didn't turn out like I wanted, for sure, but it was fun, I learned a lot, and I made enough money to start investing, which led me to my current job. I don't regret it at all.”
“I suppose if I didn't have Loopt, I'd have to, I don't know, pick up the phone and just start calling people, a lot more texting and certainly more Googling.”
“Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.”
“I believe in the future, and to be a good investor, you have to believe in the future.”
“The biggest part of Loopt is about discovering the world around you, never replacing a social experience - only adding to it.”
“I think extreme secrecy is a bad sign in all startups. Very few startups die because they tell you exactly how their technology works. On the long list of startup killers, that's pretty far down. Though on the list of entrepreneur fears, it's pretty high.”
“I believe whatever smart, ambitious people are working on will be the trend of the future. I do think that it's worth thinking critically about what the future will be.”
“The thing about Y Combinator that's cool is that most companies won't happen if we don't fund them.”
“Sometimes people think Y Combinator has big ideas about themes. But really, we just fund the best startups.”
“Generally, you want to raise capital either when you have to or when it's really easy. If the company desperately needs money, and they can't figure out any other way, then they need to raise money. Or if someone's offering you easy money on good terms, you should take it because you can use it for good things.”
“All the reasons that have made software so successful are beginning to happen with hardware. So much can be done so quickly, prototyped so rapidly, and the costs are so low.”