Sam Altman Quotes
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Don't let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.
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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.
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The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.
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Tech companies tend to do tech best.
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I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they'll go on to greatness, or maybe they'll never get off the runway at all.
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Intelligence is usually easy to tell in a 10-minute conversation. Determination is harder.
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Virgin America flyers tend to be more likely to be using a mobile device and tapping social networks - even at 35,000 feet.
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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.
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The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.
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The only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you're making sufficiently good.
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The Loopt mobile app is all about giving you the latest local deals and insider tips.
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Background updating is absolutely the future.
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The whole concept of rewarding customers is a big trend.
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You really want a company full of missionaries, not mercenaries.
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There's this famous observation that I totally believe: Great startup ideas are the ones that lie in the intersection of the Venn diagram of 'is a good idea' and 'looks like a bad idea.' So you want most people to think it's a bad idea and thus not compete with you until you get giant. But for it to secretly be good.
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A lot of people don't love their bank.
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If you compromise and hire someone mediocre, you will always regret it.
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Many founders hire just because it seems like a cool thing to do, and people always ask how many employees you have.
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Many of the companies in the mobile location space are trying to figure out different ways to tie what they're doing to commerce.
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The crowd's a really powerful force on the Internet, and people finally understand how to harness that.
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Don't hire for the sake of hiring. Hire because there is no other way to do what you want to do.
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If you have the opportunity to go be an early employee at a company that's just going crazy, and you believe it's the next Facebook or Google, you should go join that company.
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For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.
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Loopt isn't a service that keeps you locked in, staring at your screen.