Sam Altman

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

You can have a startup and one other thing, you can have a family, but you probably can\'t have many other things.

More infoLosing focus is another way that founders get off track.

... 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.

One of the keys to focus, and why I said cofounders that aren\'t friends really struggle, is that you can\'t be focused without good communication.

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?

Why now, why is this the perfect time for this particular idea, and to start this particular company?

Why couldn\'t it have been done 2 years ago, and why will 2 years in the future be too late?

Maybe I am a bit unusual here, but I am less stressed if I have my phone with me. Because I can spend like an hour in the morning taking care of everything instead of I sit there and wonder what I missed or wonder what\'s happening. So it\'s way less stressful for me to just answer my phone.

All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.

The whole concept of rewarding customers is a big trend.

The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.

The way to build billion dollar companies is to first build something people love. There isn\'t really a shortcut there.

What is OK is to spend money for productivity. What is not OK is just to light money on fire.

I always tell my partners that our job is to fund all the companies we can that can be worth $10 billion or more. That\'s such a difficult constraint, we can\'t have any other constraints.

People always make the mistake of calling an idea small or stupid because they don\'t understand how it\'s going to evolve.

Intelligence is usually easy to tell in a 10-minute conversation. Determination is harder.

There is a lot of stuff I like. I love backpacking. I love going to an island where I can just sit on the beach and read or scuba dive and sail. I do a lot of that. I still go backpacking around Europe in the summers and staying in hostels. I love that.

The thing about Y Combinator that\'s cool is that most companies won\'t happen if we don\'t fund them.

There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things. Founders are able to set the vision for their companies with an authority no one else can.

The correlation of quality of life and cost of energy is huge.

Companies generally work better when they are smaller. It\'s always worth spending time to think about the least amount of projects/work you can feasibly do, and then having as small a team as possible to do it.

All the reasons that have made software so successful are beginning to happen with hardware. So much can be done so quickly, prototyped so rapidly, and the costs are so low.

The reduction in compassion that happens when we\'re all behind computer screens is not good for the world.

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.

The only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you\'re making sufficiently good.

If you wanted to build an Internet startup in 2005, you had to buy your own servers and hire someone to manage it. Now, that\'s unheard of.

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.

Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.

Don\'t hire for the sake of hiring. Hire because there is no other way to do what you want to do.