Sam Altman Quotes

I knew, back when I was starting up, that if I had something that could be developed for the mass market, I could really take it forward.

Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.

Every successful business, even Google, Facebook, Twitter, started with a combination of manual improvements and friends of the founders using the site.

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

From an operational perspective, exports challenge companies to design, develop, manufacture and supply products to discerning customers in global markets. This, in turn, motivates companies to scale up the value chain, which results in higher realisations.

So it's really for us about new products, because we have released a lot of new products.

A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.

It's actually not unlike Google at that stage of development. They had an up-and-running site. It wasn't losing very much money, it wasn't making very much money, but it was growing.

We are looking for development partners, people to work alongside us, which will accelerate our actually getting licences, the technology into product, into the markets.

You've got to stay super focused on shipping product. There isn't a version two or three if there isn't a great version one.

Making new products is an easy tap for a company in a recession.

Solving problems for users at scale ultimately results in monetization opportunities.

Even though Traf-O-Data wasn't a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft's first product a couple of years later.

Launching a successful product or startup has little to do with luck. Any business that gains traction on the market is the result of very careful strategizing and market analysis, not to mention the development of an original product or service.

A lot of multinationals have long, drawn-out processes and are pretty useless at putting products on the shelves quickly.

When I see some of the work in the commercial PC sector, some of our top focus is in India.

There's nothing wrong with a business that supports you and perhaps an extended family. But if you want to build a scalable startup, you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year.

In their infancy, startups need geniuses who fit their current tight-knit culture and will iterate quickly as they push towards an ambitious vision - and they need a scaffolding of advisors, strategists, early users, and product-thinkers around these savants to guide them.

Building a product is easy. But building the company that builds the product is hard.

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

It may be easier than ever to start a product, but building a company is just as hard as its ever been.

I want to get America's private sector growing and I know how to do it.

One thing I tell startups all the time is that the best way to grow is to make their product better.

In the entrepreneurial world, when you launch a company, you have a particular idea, a particular product, a particular service, almost always you pivot, you shift. The market reacts to your initial idea. You make some adjustments. It's only after making a few adjustments that you see the success.

If you're not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long.