Sam Altman Quotes

You should be giving out a lot of equity to your employees.

The importance of discretion increases with closeness to the top of a hierarchical organization.

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

All organizations are hierarchical. At each level people serve under those above them. An organization is therefore a structured institution. If it is not structured, it is a mob. Mobs do not get things done, they destroy things.

You can call anyyne here or call me. We have no formal chain of command.

All parties have one leader at the top who is the first among equals.

In the industrial age, the CEO sat on the top of the hierarchy and didn't have to listen to anybody ... In the information age, you have to listen to the ideas of people regardless of where they are in the organization.

In large organizations the dilution of information as it passes up and down the hierarchy, and horizontally across departments, can undermine the effort to focus on common goals.

I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.

The organization of ofices follows the principle of hierarchy ... each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one

Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme.

The vast majority of people in any organization, even quite high up, have got no idea who the real masters are.

The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.

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.

I have always admired the Linking Pin theory of management specialist Rensis Likert. It says that in every organization there are leaders who link the lower level to the upper level. What makes somebody an effective link as a leader is that he conveys down everything that above wants and he conveys up everything that below needs.

In the beginning of a company, there is no management and this actually works really well.

Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.

[Donald Trump] is in the process of building up an organization. And well, we'll have to see how that works. And it'll be a test, I think, for him and the people that he's designated to be able to execute on his vision.

Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.

Organizations are not really "owned" by anyone. What formerly constituted ownership was split up into stockholders' rights to share in profits, management's power to set policy, employees' right to status and security, government's right to regulate. Thus older forms of wealth were replaced by new forms.

Hierarchy is an organization with its face toward the CEO and its ass toward the customer.

There exist better models of decisionmaking, for the governance of states, corporations and other large organizations, for example in Germany. We need to study such models and promising pathways on which our existing decisionmaking procedures can be gradually reformed.

Nobody really likes large-scale organizations; nobody likes to take orders from a superior who takes orders from a superior who takes orders.

Without institution there is no management. But without management there is no institution.

Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.