Sam Altman Quotes

While 'The Owner's Manual' is not a formula for guaranteed success by any means, we're confident it will help reduce the failure rate of most startups that use our Customer Development process.

Part of the entrepreneurial thing is there are lots of ways to die.

Idle minds are the devil's research-and-development department.

He who wants to do everything will never do anything.

I once found myself driving, smoking a cigar, taking notes, and talking on the phone at the same time. I only became completely aware of this when I had to shift, and realized something had to give.

It takes years and years, usually a decade, to create a great startup.

Most startup failures result from entrepreneurs who are better at making excuses than products.

One should want only one thing and want it constantly. Then one is sure of getting it. But I desire everything, and consequently get nothing.

The distracted person, too, can form habits.

Choosing a job or business is the same thing. I'm not the best one to advise someone how to make billions of dollars; I don't know how to do that. But what I do know is how to create something that you love, and once you do that, you will have success. You just will because you'll love working on it, and anything truly authentic, the universe blesses.

I knew I needed a partner. I needed someone who could focus on and spearhead the business side of things, and [Neal Dodson] was great at that. That's how it started.

When going to the temple to adore Divinity neither say nor do any thing in the interim pertaining to the common affairs of life.

It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much but not decisively in any one thing; all my interests are not subordinated in one but stand on an equal footing.

I'm a creature who bores, easily. I could never do one job, for the rest of my life.

Anybody who is an entrepreneur is a person who essentially has impaired judgment. The odds of success are zilch. This valley is loaded to the gills with a whole lot of totally insane people who honest to God believe that they can be the next Bill Gates or the next Scott McNealy. And that is genuinely stupid.

There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere

At YC we have this public phrase, and it's relentlessly resourceful.

They whom trifles distract and nothing occupies are but children.

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.

Believing your own bullshit is always a perilous activity, but never more fatal than for the owner of a start-up venture.

Too many start up business fail simply because their owners continue to think and act like employees.

I certainly do not adore the writer's discipline. I have lost lovers, endangered friendships, and blundered into eccentricity, impelled by a concentration which usually is to be found only in the minds of people about to be executed in the next half hour.

People without clear vision are easily distracted, have a tendency to drift from one idea to another and often make foolish decisions that rob them of their dreams.

One great cause of failure is lack of concentration.

The irony of multitasking is that it's exhausting: when you're doing two or three things simultaneously, you use more energy than the sum of energy required to do each task independently. You're also cheating yourself because your're not doing anything excellently. You're compromising your virtuosity. In the words of T. S. Elliot, you're 'distracted from distractions by distractions'.