Sam Altman Quotes about Team

One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them.

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?

It's better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it's still bad to be a solo founder.

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.

The best people know that they should join a rocketship.

No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.

You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.

The best source by far for hiring is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know.

Every first time founder waits too long, everyone hopes that an employee will turn around. But the right answer is to fire fast.

If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.

At YC we have this public phrase, and it's relentlessly resourceful.

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.

At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.

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.

To get the very best people- they have a lot of great options, and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone.

I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.

... how much time you should be spending on hiring? The answer is 0 or 25 percent.

A lot of people treat choosing their cofounder with even less importance than they put on hiring. Don't do this.

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

Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.

You think you have this great idea that everyone's going to come join, but that's not how it works.

... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.

For early employees you want people that have somewhat of a risk-taking attitude.

AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.

You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.