33 Quotes from Startup Playbook by Sam Altman

0. Everything will feel broken all the time—the diversity and magnitude of the disasters will surprise you. Your job is to fix them with a smile on your face and reassure your team that it’ll all be ok. Usually things aren’t as bad as they seem, but sometimes they are in fact really bad. In any case, just keep going. Keep growing. <!-- I like this quote the most :) -->

1. We’re looking for businesses that get more powerful with scale and that are difficult to copy.

2. We greatly prefer something new to something derivative. Most really big companies start with something fundamentally new (one acceptable definition of new is 10x better.)

3. One important counterintuitive reason for this is that it’s easier to do something new and hard than something derivative and easy. People will want to help you and join you if it’s the former; they will not if it’s the latter.

4. The best ideas sound bad but are in fact good. So you don’t need to be too secretive with your idea—if it’s actually a good idea, it likely won’t sound like it’s worth stealing.

5. So it’s better not to try too actively to force yourself to come up with startup ideas. Instead, learn about a lot of different things. Practice noticing problems, things that seem inefficient, and major technological shifts. Work on projects you find interesting. Go out of your way to hang around smart, interesting people. At some point, ideas will emerge.

6. When I used to do later-stage investing, I looked equally hard at the strength of the employees the founders hired.

7. What makes a great founder? The most important characteristics are ones like unstoppability, determination, formidability, and resourcefulness. Intelligence and passion also rank very highly.

8. If you improve your product 5% every week, it will really compound.

9. You should not put anyone between the founders and the users for as long as possible—that means the founders need to do sales, customer support, etc.

10. Some common questions we ask startups having problems: Are users using your product more than once? Are your users fanatical about your product? Would your users be truly bummed if your company went away? Are your users recommending you to other people without you asking them to do it? If you’re a B2B company, do you have at least 10 paying customers? If not, then that’s often the underlying problem, and we tell companies to make their product better.

11. The prime directive of great execution is “Never lose momentum”.

12. Counterintuitively, it turns out that it’s good if you’re growing fast but nothing is optimized—all you need to do is fix it to get more growth!

13. A related trap is thinking about problems too far in the future—i.e. “How are we going
to do this at massive scale?” The answer is to figure it out when you get there. ... A good rule of thumb is to only think about how things will work at 10x your current scale.

14. No great company I know of started doing multiple things at once—they start with a lot of conviction about one thing, and see it all the way through.

15. You can do far fewer things than you think.

16. Great founders listen to all of the advice and then quickly make their own decisions.

17. I have never, not once, seen a slow-moving founder be really successful.

18. A CEO has to 1) set the vision and strategy for the company, 2) evangelize the company to everyone, 3) hire and manage the team, especially in areas where you yourself have gaps 4) raise money, and 5) set the execution quality bar.

19. Being a CEO is lonely. It’s important to have relationships with other CEOs you can call when everything is melting down (one of the important accidental discoveries of YC was a way for founders to have peers.)

20. A successful startup takes a very long time—certainly much longer than most founders think at the outset. You cannot treat it as an all-nighter. You have to eat well, sleep well, and exercise.

21. Let yourself feel upset at the injustice for 1 minute, and then realize that it’s up to you to figure out a solution. Strive for people to say “X just somehow always gets things done” when talking about you.

22. Be persistent. Most founders give up too quickly or move on to the next product too quickly.

23. If things generally aren’t going well, figure out what the root cause of the problem is and make sure you address that.

24. One mistake that CEOs often make is to innovate in well-trodden areas of business instead of innovating in new products and solutions. For example, many founders think that they should spend their time discovering new ways to do HR, marketing, sales, financing, PR, etc. This is nearly always bad. Do what works in the well-established areas, and focus your creative energies on the product or service you’re building.

25. Hiring is one of your most important jobs and the key to building a great company (as opposed to a great product.)

26. My first piece of advice about hiring is don’t do it. The most successful companies we’ve worked with at YC have waited a relatively long time to start hiring employees. Employees are expensive. Employees add organizational complexity and communication overhead.

27. When you are in recruiting mode (i.e., from when you get product-market fit to T-infinity), you should spend about 25% of your time on it. At least one founder, usually the CEO, needs to get great at recruiting.

28. Don’t compromise on the quality of people you hire. Everyone knows this, and yet everyone compromises on this at some point during a desperate need. Everyone goes on to regret it, and it sometimes almost kills the company.

29. Value aptitute over experience for almost all roles. Look for raw intelligence and a track
record of getting things done. Look for people you like.

30. 99% of the time, you should ignore competitors.

31. In any case, try to get to “ramen profitability”—i.e., make enough money so that the founders can live on ramen—as quickly as you can. When you get here, you control your own destiny and are no longer at the whims of investors and financial markets.

32. Great board members are one of the best outside forcing functions for a company other than users, and outside forcing functions are worth more than most founders think.