Sam Altman Quotes

I run a small company with 18 employees on its payroll.

Many of the best YC companies have had phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders.

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

The bigger a company gets, the more people are involved in decisions, the slower decisions get made. Look, the whole theory of startups is that three motivated people can go and do something that every company can't.

On the tech side, little start-ups can do something magnificent. They don't need too much in terms of plants and infrastructure.

It struck me that most businesses have less than 100 employees, but most payroll services were going after bigger companies.

I'm always happy when I hear about people selling records or selling books or selling movies. It makes me proud of them.

My drive into high tech doesn't involve a lot of people - just me and a very small team.

The down market favours the small two-, three-, four-person company, not the huge company with 100 people losing half a million dollars a month.

Today, our economy is divided: fifty percent is the public economy and fifty percent is the private economy that includes small companies employing from 4 to 200 workers.

One of the biggest problems of 'In Search of Excellence' is that it focused on giant, publicly-traded companies. There are thousands upon thousands of excellent companies. Some of them are two-person accountancies in a community of three thousand people.

The best talent in the venture industry doesn't work in large companies and won't work in large companies.

Big companies have no future …. There are no more advantages to big business. There are only disadvantages.

When we launched the first version of Basecamp in 2004, we decided to build software for small companies just like us.

I work with tiny companies, so I don't really live in unicorn world, to be honest.

The most important thing is to keep your team as small as possible.

I'm very proud of my team, and the way they stood behind me - and I'm very happy to show my female fans in that audience, and even my gay fans in that audience.

I am really proud to HAVE been an Arsenal player.

I just don't have words to express how proud I am of this race team.

Everyone on my team should be extraordinarily proud of what they have done.

Good people have always been at the heart of the Virgin business, and that's largely because we have tried to keep our business small, and our management teams tight-knit. I feel that small, compact companies, are better run. That is partly because people feel more connected in small companies.

Is your company so small you have to do everything for yourself? Wait until you're so big that you can't. That's worse.

I've never seen a job being done by a five-hundred-person engineering team that couldn't be done better by fifty people.

If lucky be not proud; if unlucky, do not despond.

I'm still proud of a lot of my jokes when I started.