Sam Altman Quotes

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.

One of the great things about young entrepreneurs is that they don't know that something can't be done. So they try something that's so audacious and usually end up pulling it off.

None of the great discoveries was made by a 'specialist' or a 'researcher'.

To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen, bad ones are free.

As an owner, you have a choice. Do you want to adopt a vision that you think is real sharp and real cutting edge and could get you from good to great - has a chance - or do you want to just say the organization is not about that, and we're not going to try to adopt a new coaching philosophy and vision.

It's always the organizations that are resource constrained that come up with the good ideas to win.

The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.

Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y', so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food.' And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't.

The most successful people in the world are the ones who thought of that idea that was 'too crazy to work.'

Crazy ideas sometimes work, and the technological society that we have is built on a foundation of those crazy ideas that work.

My approach to creating content is focused on pulling people out of their intellectual comfort zones. I'm interested in presenting ideas in unique ways that challenge people to question their assumptions.

Indians have very good engineering capabilities, and that is why, if an industry focuses on innovation, you will have a far greater chance of success, rather than the model which is based on just being a production machine.

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

Entrepreneurs are great at dealing with uncertainty and also very good at minimizing risk. That's the classic great entrepreneur.

If we have a great idea, we'll go, 'Oh, this could be a cool movie.' Or really for us, it's more like, 'Oh, this is a really bad idea. Let's do this. This seems really stupid.'

Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name.

It's important to have people who will say to you that you're really off the beaten track.

We were in the market ahead of competition. We brought new products on the market ahead of competition. We rolled out our networks. We begged, borrowed, stole, put things out. And while they were never near perfect, they were first. And that gave us, to my mind, a lot of advantage.

Part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur, if you're going for a really huge opportunity, is trying to find problems that aren't quite on the radar yet and try to solve those.

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.

To me, unconventional thinking is approaching a problem and asking, 'Why not? Why can't something be done?' If someone can't give me a good reason why you can't do something, I find a way to do it.

I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.

Whenever I try to do something, I figure out what other people aren't doing or how can I do it different or how can I stand out.