Sam Altman Quotes

I run the largest survey company in the world. It just so happens to be the second-largest company run by someone in my house.

Big companies are often in the process of laying off workers. Small startup companies are the ones that are hiring. The statistics prove that's where job growth is going to occur.

Even if you're a relatively small player in search, that can still mean a company that's worth several billion dollars.

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

PepsiCo is a $63 billion company. Half the company is snacks, and half the company is beverages. We have a glorious snacks business and a glorious beverage business. We are extremely profitable. We are growing.

If guys try to make a bigger company for the sake of size, they don't create value in most cases.

What I've learned in my career is that it takes the same amount of effort to build a $10bn company as it does a $1bn company; you as the entrepreneur are going to put your entire life, your entire effort into it.

If somebody told me you'd be a one and a half billion dollar company and be the largest in the world, I wouldn't have believed it myself.

Many founders hire just because it seems like a cool thing to do, and people always ask how many employees you have.

I have 120 employees on the road every day, and about 30 other employees off the road.

And our size: The company this year is going to be close to $50 billion, so if that's the case and you can continue to grow that fast, I would rather put my energies to solving customer problems and growing our business than worrying about integrating and laying people off.

Too many companies are just being big for the sheer sake of it. Too many CEOs thinking bigger is better.

What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.

If you don't have collective agreements between unions and employers, governments have to legislate more.

I suspect there's a lot of validity to the premise that big companies aren't going to attract entrepreneurial talent.

You can't run a €10 million business the way you run a €1 million business.

We have many rules and regulations that can be sometimes confusing and complicated. By reaching out to the employer community and educating them on what their responsibilities and obligations are to their work force, that, along, with strong enforcement, is the best way to protect workers.

There's no way we can invent enough stuff for a company of Merck's size.

Microsoft is a much bigger company than Qualcomm - a much bigger company - and there were a few days where I thought, 'I don't know if I can do this. It's huge.' My job was to come into the company and grow new businesses, and I thought, 'I'm not sure,' but it's all worked out pretty well.

I do whatever the manager tells us to do, really.

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

One in five of our customers books for business. But it's scaling very fast. As a result, we have tools for medium or small-sized companies to allow them set their price and give basic reporting functionality.

I'd love to see more businesses take this approach - intentionally rightsizing themselves. Hit a number that feels good and say, 'Let's stick around here.'

The easier question might be, 'What isn't Alibaba?' The company is only 15 years old, but it has gotten so big over that timeframe that it basically touches every single part of the Chinese economy. I think the simplest comparison to draw is that it is like eBay and Amazon combined.

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