Sam Altman Quotes

The entire time I was modeling, I was trying and failing at businesses. In fact, we would have started our business much sooner had I been more successful.

Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.

If you look at the careers of great entrepreneurs and you look at the moment they took their plunge, the plunge is rarely a great financial or material risk, it’s a social risk. At the moment they started their new businesses, everyone around them said ‘you’re an idiot’.

Of all the entrepreneurial opportunities available today, one of the most important is direct selling, also called network marketing.

Life's not real easy right now. But I guess I'd rather have it this way than not at all.

Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.

The greatest million dollar insight I can give anybody is find a big problem and then solve it in a big way.

A lot of artists have a lot of different ventures, I think it's typical for a hip hop artist, at this point, to have a bunch of different ventures.

Never let money get in the way of an idea

The only way to understand these difficult parts of the Bible, or even to approach them with safety, is first to read and obey the easy ones.

I've opened the way for others to make fortunes, but a fortune for myself was not what I was after.

I want to be a serial entrepreneur: Incubate an idea, get it to a good state, and make that an enabler to get to the next state. It's every researcher's fantasy.

I'm not sure I knew what an entrepreneur was when I was ten, but I knew that starting little businesses and trying to sell greeting cards or newspapers door-to-door or just vending machine kind of thing is.. there's just something very intriguing to me about that.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

I'm an entrepreneur and I love business. That's what I've always done. I went to school for that. My father took me out and said, 'You're gonna be here like everybody else.'

People say doing a startup is like a marathon. It's actually a roadtrip at night with no headlights. You think you're going to Toledo but you're actually going to Miami and you might not have enough gas so you might need to buy gas from someone who might take you out if you aren't driving well

If we go for the easy way, then we never change.

Anyway, if you needed something really dangerous, get a gun. It's easy, it's cheap, and it's the American way.

We hear again and again from founders, that they wish they had waited to start a startup until they came up with an idea they really loved.

The only way I can protect him now is to make sure he never understands how easy killing can become.

The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck & to provide new ways to get it unstuck.

You don't know Jay-Z's scedule. He's a renaissance man.

Capital does not 'beget profit' as Marx thought. The capital goods as such are dead things that in themselves do not accomplish anything. If they are utilized according to a good idea, profit results. If they are utilized according to a mistaken idea, no profit or losses result. It is the entrepreneurial decision that creates either profit or loss.

There's no way I know, to get through the pain of a startup without belief that the mission really matters.

I make money from touring and selling merchandise, and I honestly believe if you put effort into something and you execute properly, you don't necessarily have to go through the traditional ways.