Sam Altman quotes:

Making money is often more fun than spending it, though I personally have never regretted money I've spent on friends, new experiences, saving time, travel, and causes I believe in.

Seed investing is the status symbol of Silicon Valley. Most people don't want Ferraris, they want a winning seed investment.

Whether or not money can buy happiness, it can buy freedom, and that's a big deal. Also, lack of money is very stressful.

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

Everyone is looking for the hack, the secret to success without hard work.

Set a clear, easy-to-understand vision for your company, and make it be a mission people believe in.

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.

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

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.

Tech companies tend to do tech best.

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.

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

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.

Traditional local advertising is not what retailers want. They want not just for you to see an ad - they want you to come into the store, to be a repeat customer and to spread the word.

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.

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.

I wouldn't call Loopt a failure. It didn't turn out like I wanted, for sure, but it was fun, I learned a lot, and I made enough money to start investing, which led me to my current job. I don't regret it at all.

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

People hate searching.

Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.

I suppose if I didn't have Loopt, I'd have to, I don't know, pick up the phone and just start calling people, a lot more texting and certainly more Googling.

I get up late, have an espresso, and immediately start work. I try to get roughly caught up on email before I leave the house, then if I need to write anything or review a complex deal, I do that, and then I head to the office and work on my top few priorities for the day. I try to schedule my meetings in the afternoon.

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.

I think extreme secrecy is a bad sign in all startups. Very few startups die because they tell you exactly how their technology works. On the long list of startup killers, that's pretty far down. Though on the list of entrepreneur fears, it's pretty high.

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.

I think the mistake people make most often when they invest in other kinds of startups is they say, 'This is totally different.' And so the things that matter, like making a product that people desperately want, like talking to customers, they throw this out the window. That is a recipe for heartache and tears.

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

Generally, you want to raise capital either when you have to or when it's really easy. If the company desperately needs money, and they can't figure out any other way, then they need to raise money. Or if someone's offering you easy money on good terms, you should take it because you can use it for good things.

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.

I think that inexpensive sources of planet-friendly energy are one of the most important things for us to pursue.

If a company is profitable, the founder is in control. If it's not, investors are in control.

Facebook and Instagram are spiritual brothers.

So if you want a culture where people work hard, & pay attention to detail, focus on the customer, are frugal: you have to do it yourself.

In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.

... why I said cofounders that aren't friends really struggle, is that you can't be focused without good communication.

You can't be focussed without really great communication

You're either not hiring at all or it's probably your single biggest block of time.

Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.

You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.

Press releases are easier to write than code, and that is still easier than making a great product.

Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first...at least 100 employees and often many more.

You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.

Background updating is absolutely the future.

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

Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance, and that's sort of just the sad reality.

No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.

The thirteenth search engine- and without all the features of a web portal, most people thought that was pointless.

Starting a business is like riding a wave between life and death. If you can hang on long enough, you're bound to succeed

We've seen a lot of data at YC now, and the most successful companies and the ones where the investors do the best... end up giving a lot of stock out to employees- year after year after year.

People that are really smart and that can learn new things can almost always find a role in the company as time goes on.

A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn't won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing.

You certainly don't need to have everything figured out in the path from here to world domination.

I think you can say a lot of evil behavior by companies is short-term optimization.

Anonymity breeds meanness.

Sometimes people think Y Combinator has big ideas about themes. But really, we just fund the best startups.

The Loopt mobile app is all about giving you the latest local deals and insider tips.

You really want a company full of missionaries, not mercenaries.

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.

Virgin America flyers tend to be more likely to be using a mobile device and tapping social networks - even at 35,000 feet.

That culture of frugality and discipline is really important for the Y Combinator mindset.

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.

All throughout my life I have been deeply immersed in startups, either because I was running one or investing in them or helping them.

People appreciate when you make an effort to speak their language.

I don't invest in companies where my mental model is that they need to get themselves acquired in the next few years - or ever.

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

The start-ups that do well are the ones that are working all the time.

Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large competitors.

I don't often get involved with campaigns at all.

The biggest part of Loopt is about discovering the world around you, never replacing a social experience - only adding to it.

I believe in the future, and to be a good investor, you have to believe in the future.

... and you can only have 2 or 3 things everyday, because everything else will just come at you; you know fires in a day.

... but actually it sucks to have a lot of employees, and you should be proud of how few employees you have.

... but the pendulum has swung way out of whack here. A bad idea is still bad, and the pivot happy world we're in today feels suboptimal.

... companies that I've been very involved with, that have had a very bad first hire in the first 3 or so employees never recover from it...

... fire fast when it's not working. It's better for the company, it's also better for the employee.

... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.

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

... if you talk to say any of the first 40 or 50 employees, they all feel like they were a part of the founding of the company.

... the thing we see wrong with YC apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first and what people want first.

... We probably funded a rate of something like one out of ten solo teams.

... we talk to a team, they've gotten new things done, that's the best predictor we have that a company will go on to be successful.

... 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.

... you should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.

... you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.

1 of the hardest parts about being a founder, is that there are a 100 important things competing for your attention each day.

A board member of mine used to say sales fix everything in a startup, and that is really true.

A lot of people treat choosing their cofounder with even less importance than they put on hiring. Don't do this.

A related advantage of mission oriented ideas, is that you yourself will be dedicated to them.

A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.

A small communication breakdown is enough for everyone to be working on slightly different things. And then you loose focus...

A third advantage of mission oriented companies, is that people outside the company are more willing to help you.

Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you'll probably end up in a pretty good place.

AirBnB happened because Brian Chesky couldn't pay his rent, but did have some space.

AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.

Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.

As long as you keep doing the right thing and have the best product, you can beat the bigger company.

As the company grows and about this 25 or so employee size, your main job shifts from building a great product to building a great company.

As you grow, it feels hopelessly corporate but it really is worth putting in place these compensation bands.

As you grow, the productivity I think, goes down with the square of the number of employees if you don't make an effort.

At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.

At YC we have this public phrase, and it's relentlessly resourceful.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It's easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.

Because it's one of these sort of connections between nodes- every pair of people adds communication overhead.

Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building, the ones that do have a huge advantage.

Before 20 or 25 employees, most companies are structured with everyone reporting to the founder. It's totally flat.

Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.

By the way, that's my number one piece of advice if you're going to join a startup: pick a rocket ship.

Developing a personal connection with anyone you're trying to do a big deal with is really important.

Don't let the company get distracted or excited about other things. A common mistake is that companies get excited by their own PR.

Employees will only add more value over time.

Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.

Every company has a rocky beginning.

Every first time founder waits too long, everyone hopes that an employee will turn around. But the right answer is to fire fast...

Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture.

Execution gets divided into two key questions: 1) can you figure out what to do and 2) can you get it done.

Experience matters for some roles and not others.

Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality.