All throughout my life I have been deeply immersed in startups, either because I was running one or investing in them or helping them. – Sam Altman
What is OK is to spend money for productivity. What is not OK is just to light money on fire. – Sam Altman
Set a clear, easy-to-understand vision for your company, and make it be a mission people believe in. – Sam Altman
People always make the mistake of calling an idea small or stupid because they don’t understand how it’s going to evolve. – Sam Altman
One of the things we urge Y-Combinator companies to do is to have profitability in grasp. If you need to get profitable before your A round of money, you ought to be able to do that. – Sam Altman
I think that inexpensive sources of planet-friendly energy are one of the most important things for us to pursue. – Sam Altman
The only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you’re making sufficiently good. – Sam Altman
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. – Sam Altman
Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I’d say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies – and I’ve observed a lot now – don’t do a very good job of that. – Sam Altman
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. – Sam Altman