Sam Altman Quotes

I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.

With a private company, you've got to get into who's investing and what's the balance sheet like. So going public is a positive thing from the perspective of the sales organization.

We seldom give each other advice-I think that's the success of 25 years of marriage.

If you were a corporation needing financial services, and I can give you something better, faster, and cheaper across 12 products as opposed to eight, that's business. I'm doing it because I'm serving you; I'm not doing it because I want to be universal.

Perfection I've lived with the pretense of perfection for seventeen years. Give my room a cursory inspection, you'd think I have OCD. But it's only habit and not obsession that keeps it all orderly. Of course, I don't want to give the impression that it's all up to me.

A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it... I don't know, 20 times a day.

I'm not a big believer in linear paths. I would always have these sort of five-year plans and think, 'Ok, I wouldn't mind to try to get here in five years.'

In 2013 Citigroup had profits of $6.4 billion in the United States. They paid no federal income tax and, in fact, received a rebate from the IRS of $260 million. That same year J.P. Morgan had $17.2 billion in profits in the U.S. They also paid no federal income tax. Do you think it's time for tax reform?

The Congress is not willing to think about the long term. They act like activist shareholders, to use that phrase again. They're not thinking about what can we do that will make us richer, safer, and stronger next year, and the year after, and five and 10 years out.

We give 10 percent of our income to our church every year. Do you think that is the kind of person who is trying to hide things, or do things?

Those who think only for a year, they sow food grains; those who think for a decade, they plant fruits; But those who think for generations, they prepare humans.

Your manner of life now is already determining your life in those years of old age and retirement, without your realizing it even, and perhaps without your giving enough thought to it. One must therefore prepare oneself for retirement.

I want it to be able to hold up in 30 years' time. So, I'm really thinking about everything.

It's like every time you have one of these, you're sort of - your lease is renewed another five years. And that's kind of great for me 'cause that's all I really want to be doing still at this point, like just making records and getting to work with, like, artists that I think are exciting.

I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought.

I'm no genius. I'm not at all; I just happen to look five or 10 years ahead and think things through.

I don’t know what I’m doing in the next five minutes and she has the next ten years figured out. I’ll worry about making it out of ninth grade alive. Then I’ll think about a career path.

I don't think they (the Chinese) have better friends in Africa than us. But when we compare to how much money we get, if we succeed, if the MCA is funded by the US Congress for Tanzania, it's going to be $700 Million. It's going to be huge, it may be a total of all the Chinese have been giving us all these years.

Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.

Hopefully 10 years from now people won't even realize we started out selling shoes. They will just think about Zappos as a place to get the best customer service.

Incapable of enjoying the moment, the male needs something to look forward to, and money provides him with an eternal, never-ending goal: Just think of what you could do with 80 trillion dollars -- invest it! And in three years time you'd have 300 trillion dollars!!!

I like to think I have a good few years left of my career yet, as long as I stay fit and healthy. However, it's always good to have a backup plan, which is why I have been working hard to build my business portfolio outside tennis.

I think I quite desperately wanted to have that kind of special companionship [like marriage ] . . . a special relationship, yet I hid from it for many, many years and pretended to be cynical about it.

Metallica's the only band i've ever been in. I'm not sure that when it ends in five, ten years, I'm going to put an ad in the paper saying, 'stupid drummer looking for stupid people to play music with,' Metallica is it and I think when that ceases, that's it.

I think we had to push forward to make sure it was different, do something that we had never done before and yet still have the consistency to stay in the same world. This was our chance to do all the things we didn't get a chance to do before. We've been working on these movies [Kung Fu Panda] for twelve years and we have to keep things exciting for us in order for us to devote that many years of our lives to do this.