Sam Altman Quotes

In virtually every organization, regardless of mission and function, people are frustrated by problems that seem unsolvable.

A lot of the dysfunction that exists underneath the surface of a lot of big business corporations is really profound.

I've built my career on unpaid interns, and the interns told me it was great - I learned more from you than I did in college.

Life... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.

There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster.

Herbalife: the customers are fictitious, the business opportunity is a scam, the university degree is a fraud.

A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad.

From the outside, Yahoo was extremely successful. It was making money; it was still bigger than Google. But when I got there, I learned what a disaster of a company looks like from the inside. There were a lot of vice presidents, and it was basically a turf battle between them.

... an impossible organization to administer ... just an amorphous lump.

Rotten bosses don't get better. Any strategy that assumes they can is doomed.

The world is littered with the tales of small businesses in the dire straits of hiring that spent time and money they couldn't afford to hire people who couldn't perform.

The business was in a very difficult state when I first took over the company. I walked into a situation where cheques were getting written, popped in drawers, so that when people phoned up, they could honestly say, 'Look, we've signed the cheque. You'll get it ultimately.'

It's bad when there are internal problems at the club - when people have doubts about you internally.

Having no choice doesn't result in innovation and performance improvement.

There's nothing more damaging than an irate moviegoer who hasn't seen what the film trailer promised.

I could only be frustrated right from the day I started in WCW and realized that it was a company run by a bunch of idiots that didn't have a clue what they were doing.

the mediation of internal conflicts can be resolved by linkages with other problems.

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.

I'm sorry, I guess my company leaves a lot to be desired.

Expectations are resentments under construction.

Life’s a freaking mess… there’s not one truth ever, just a bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It’s all a beautiful calamitous mess.

The toughest are people mistakes, when you put the wrong person in a job. Sometimes you're too slow to move them out. Or not getting the right people involved to solve a problem, or doing something out of anger; you learn, just don't do that. But I'd have to say the Whale was one of them, and I would also have to put Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual on the list at this point.

I always tell other people to protect against the downside, and not risk roughing on new ventures, but I never stuck to that rule myself.

Disappointment is the gap that exists between expectation and reality.

The mind is so tricky. It will say, "No one cares. Is it true? Well, someone does. Let's see: So-and-so doesn't care. Well, maybe they do. Well, there is someone who doesn't care." It just shifts and shifts and shifts, so it can keep all of its concepts intact.