47 Quotes from Sam Altman on Startup Execution
From How to Start a Startup — Lecture 2
Published in
5 min readSep 28, 2014
From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 2
These quotes are from the second half of Lecture 2. They cover tips on successful startup business execution, including the importance of momentum and growth. To review quotes from any of the other lectures, please see the links at the bottom of this email or follow the collection.
The quotes below are all 140 characters or less, so please feel free to share as you see fit. In case I’ve missed any quotes or you find any errors, please leave me a comment and I will be sure to update the post.
- “What being a founder means, is signing up for this years long grind on execution — and you can’t outsource this.”
- “The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself.”
- “Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture.”
- “So if you want a culture where people work hard, & pay attention to detail, focus on the customer, are frugal: you have to do it yourself.”
- “The company just needs to see you as like this maniacal execution machine.”
- “There’s at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people that are willing to put in the effort to execute them well.”
- “Ideas by themselves are not worth anything, only executing well is what creates value.”
- “Execution gets divided into two key questions: 1) can you figure out what to do and 2) can you get it done.”
- “1 of the hardest parts about being a founder, is that there are a 100 important things competing for your attention each day.”
- “You need to figure out what the 2 or 3 most important things are, and then just do those.”
- “…and you can only have 2 or 3 things everyday, because everything else will just come at you; you know fires in a day.”
- “Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot.”
- “You’re saying no ninety-seven times out of a hundred, and most founders find they have to make a very conscious effort to do this.”
- “Most startups are not nearly focussed enough. They work hard…maybe, but they don’t work hard on the right things.”
- “One of the great and terrible things about starting a start up is that you get no credit for trying.”
- “You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.”
- “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.”
- “Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that’s going to be what the whole company focusses on.”
- “You can’t be focussed without really great communication”
- “A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus…”
- “…why I said cofounders that aren’t friends really struggle, is that you can’t be focused without good communication.”
- “Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.”
- “You should always know how you’re doing against your metrics. You should always have a weekly review meeting every week”
- “Don’t let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.”
- “It’s really easy to get PR with no results & it actually feels like you’re really actually cool, but in a year you’ll still have nothing.”
- “The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level.”
- “You can have a startup and one other thing, you can have a family, but you probably can’t have many other hobbies.”
- “Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that’s sort of just the sad reality.”
- “You have to be intense. This only comes from the CEO, this only comes from the founders”
- “One of the biggest advantages that start ups have is execution speed, and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm.”
- “Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality.”
- “It’s easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.”
- “You need to have a culture where people have very high quality standards in everything the company does, but still move quickly.”
- “You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.”
- “Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.”
- “The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. They get things done really quickly. “
- “…we talk to a team, they’ve gotten new things done, that’s the best predictor we have that a company will go on to be successful.”
- “Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well.”
- “If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards.”
- “A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn’t won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing.”
- “So always keep momentum, it’s this prime directive for managing a startup.”
- “For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups, it translates to don’t let your ship date slip”
- “You have to save the vision speeches for when the company is winning. When you’re not winning, you just have to get momentum back…”
- “A board member of mine used to say sales fix everything in a startup, and that is really true.”
- “One thing that often disrupts momentum and really shouldn’t is competitors.”
- “Here’s a good rule of thumb: don’t worry about a competitor at all, until they’re actually beating you with a real shipped product.”
- “Press releases are easier to write than code, and that is still easier than making a great product.”
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