Sam Altman Quotes

Entrepreneurship is like a computer game in which you have to master every level before achieving success. Startups repeatedly stumble and have to go back to the drawing board. The best way to skip some levels and to increase the odds of survival is to learn from others who have already played the game.

I do think there are more and more entrepreneurs all the time that think big. Those are the people we should be finding and funding. Most of them will fail, but the ones who succeed will change the world, and that is progress.

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.

After I graduated from Brandeis, I took all the money I had in the world, which was $5,000, and I made a short film. I made every mistake you could possibly make. It was a total disaster as a piece of work, and yet, you know, it was ambitious in some way.

You can't go into business thinking that success will come to you in just one or two years.

Once a few Facebook employees put together a promising idea and start a company, that's very exciting to people. I happen to think being a Facebook employee is really correlated with good ideas.

Recessions are the best time to start a company. Companies fail. Others hold back capital. If you are willing to do the preparation and work, it is the best time to invest in yourself and start a business.

The more entrepreneurs in the world that are getting their ideas financed, the more great companies there are going to be that we can all invest in.

Look at MIT—the smartest people in the world. They start up 50 companies a year. Only 1 makes it.

If a founder has passion and innovation, he needs to be supported. I am more intuitive than a numbers person, and I recognise that not all investments are going to be positive. Some may fail, and some may have problems for other reasons. That is life.

Without disruptions, startups can't survive.

My attitude is there are at least hundreds of interesting startups that are going to get going in every year.

I had done six or eight traditional angel investments and basically just thought it sucked.

Risk taking and the drive to pursue innovative ideas are the fuel that stokes the entrepreneurial spirit.

I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed.

There are a lot of people building small ideas now. There's an idealization of being an entrepreneur, but the most important thing is to have a really great idea.

Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

I always knew I wanted to start my own line. Nights and weekends, I would work on my business plan.

I have seen entrepreneurs ask for hundreds of millions of dollars on a concept and try to sell because of 'their passion' for an idea. If the idea is that good, why wouldn't I cut you out and hire someone who is just as passionate for much, much less?

I think Coran Capshaw is such a brilliant entrepreneur and he always thinks about new stuff; the biggest stuff you can imagine. I know he's working on a lot of things for me at the moment, and I think it will definitely help my career to go to the next level.

Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.

Relatively few people should start companies.

Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

There's an energy and excitement when you're building a company. You have so much tail wind. You're planting new seeds. But it's also scary, because there's no safety net.

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.