Sam Altman Quotes
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Background updating is absolutely the future.
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If you ask a founder how their company is doing, they always say, 'Oh it's great. We're totally crushing it,' and that's almost never true.
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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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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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The whole concept of rewarding customers is a big trend.
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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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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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Tech companies tend to do tech best.
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Communication services need interoperability to succeed - and Loopt is the first such service since SMS that is available across all major U.S. wireless carriers.
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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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You really want a company full of missionaries, not mercenaries.
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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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If you compromise and hire someone mediocre, you will always regret it.
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The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.
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Loopt isn't a service that keeps you locked in, staring at your screen.
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The Loopt mobile app is all about giving you the latest local deals and insider tips.
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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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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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A lot of people don't love their bank.
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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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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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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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The start-ups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.