65 Quotes from Sam Altman on Startup Teams, Co-Founding and Hiring
From How to Start a Startup — Lecture 2
Published in
6 min readSep 27, 2014
From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 2
These quotes are from the first half of Lecture 2. They summarize the importance of co-founder relationships, how to approach hiring, and what it takes to build a great startup team. 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.
- “Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.”
- “In YC’s case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.”
- “A lot of people treat choosing their cofounder with even less importance than they put on hiring. Don’t do this.”
- “The track record for founders that don’t already know each other is really bad.”
- “If you’re not in college and you don’t know a cofounder, the next best thing I think is to go work at an interesting company.”
- “It’s better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it’s still bad to be a solo founder.”
- “…for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.”
- “…We probably funded a rate of something like one out of ten solo teams.”
- “At YC we have this public phrase, and it’s relentlessly resourceful.”
- “You need someone that behaves like James Bond more than you need someone that is an expert in some particular domain.”
- “You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.”
- “In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder.”
- “In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.”
- “The second part of how to hire: try not to.”
- “…but actually it sucks to have a lot of employees, and you should be proud of how few employees you have.”
- “…you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.”
- “Many of the best YC companies have had phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders.”
- “At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.”
- “Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. Not to hire.”
- “The cost of getting an early hire wrong is really high.”
- “…companies that I’ve been very involved with, that have had a very bad first hire in the first 3 or so employees never recover from it…”
- “AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.”
- On AirBnB: “…if you talk to say any of the first 40 or 50 employees, they all feel like they were a part of the founding of the company.”
- “One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.”
- “You think you have this great idea that everyone’s going to come join, but that’s not how it works.”
- “To get the very best people— they have a lot of great options, and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone.”
- “The best people know that they should join a rocketship.”
- “By the way, that’s my number one piece of advice if you’re going to join a startup: pick a rocket ship.”
- “…how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.”
- “You’re either not hiring at all or it’s probably your single biggest block of time.”
- “If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.”
- “A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.”
- “If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.”
- “…you can think about that for everyone you hire: will I bet the future of this company on this single hire? And that’s a tough bar.”
- “The best source by far for hiring is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know.”
- “Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first…at least 100 employees and often many more.”
- “Experience matters for some roles and not others.”
- “For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn’t matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.”
- “Most of the best hires that I’ve made in my entire life have never done that thing before.”
- “There are 3 things I look for when I hire people. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?”
- “One of the pieces of advice that we give at YC is: try to work together on a project rather than just doing an interview.”
- “Really dig into projects people have worked on and call references; that is another thing that first time founders like to skip.”
- “If someone is difficult to talk to, if someone cannot communicate clearly, it’s a real problem in terms of their likelihood to work out.”
- “For early employees you want people that have somewhat of a risk-taking attitude.”
- “If someone is choosing between joining McKinsey or your startup it’s very unlikely they’re going to work out at the startup.”
- “You also want people who are maniacally determined and that is slightly different than having a risk tolerant attitude.”
- “…you should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.”
- “You need unstoppable people. You want people that are just going to get it done.”
- “I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.”
- “Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.”
- “Employees will only add more value over time.”
- “Investors will sort of like write the check and then, despite a lot of promises, don’t usually do that much; sometimes they do.”
- “I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees”
- “One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them.”
- “You have to let your team get all the credit for all the good stuff that happens, and you take responsibility for the bad stuff.”
- “I think the best thing you can do is be aware that as a first time founder you are likely to be a very bad manager.”
- “Firing people is one of the worst parts of running a company. Actually in my own experience, I think it is the worst.”
- “Every first time founder waits too long, everyone hopes that an employee will turn around. But the right answer is to fire fast…”
- “…fire fast when it’s not working. It’s better for the company, it’s also better for the employee.”
- “You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.”
- “If someone is getting every decision wrong, that’s when you need to act, and at that point it’ll be painfully aware to everyone.”
- “You don’t get to make their decisions but you do get to choose the decision makers.”
- “People that are really smart and that can learn new things can almost always find a role in the company as time goes on.”
- On co-founder fall outs — “The #1 piece of advice to prevent that, is to have vesting on the equity.”
- “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.”
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Image Credit: Daniel Craig — By Alan Wu
