After GPT 4o, Binge watching all of Sam Altman's interviews 😅

4:20 *Make something people love > something people want.* You can either make something that a small number of users really love, or a that a large number of users really like. The most successful companies start with only a small group of users who have intense love for the product they’ve built. 5:30 Growth is important. Momentum is everything in a startup. Incredibly difficult to recover from a loss of momentum. Startups that win keep winning, and those that lose keep losing. 7:00 As you scale past initial stages, RETAINING talent becomes as important as RECRUITING talent. Takes a lot of time and commitment. If you’re hiring people that are really good, the. they have as many options as you do. If you don’t make the role good enough that you yourself will stay in it, then you’ll have a hard time retaining your best talent for a long period of time. 8:20 Time commitment from CEO. Take out your 10 best people for dinner every month. This is what your people crave and what they personally lose, personal commitment and hearing from them and their opinions. 9:20 If you stop giving people more responsibility they will eventually leave. 9:55 Delegation becomes more and more important with scale. Most founders do too much or too little, it’s quite difficult to strike the right balance. Also, DO NOT delegate the most important thing. E.G. the area you enjoy the most and feel is most important, aka you like building product, keep doing instead of hiring a VP of product. Otherwise will lead to never ending conflict because you both want the same thing, and you won’t like the way they do it, and they wont like that you’re interfering. *Whatever you think is the 1 or 2 most critical pieces of the business, hold onto that and delegate everything else - so that you can focus on what you really want to focus on.* 14:50 You can at least fire a VP, it’s extremely difficult to fire an investor. Spend many, many hours together in person getting to know someone before adding them to your board and cap table. 16:00 A.I. is a “new life form.” “It could be the best or the worst thing to happen to humanity.” 24:40 Determination > Intelligence. “When we’ve misfired, we miscalculated on how determined that founder seemed.” 24:15 The companies that go onto do something really great tend to do something really new as well (hard to predict future breakout success). Usually includes some kind of new insight that would have failed the old tests. Is the product loved, how good are the founders, how quickly is the market growing? The markets that are best for startups Small today and going to grow explosively over the next 10 years. Has the company already captured some significant amount of some small market? 26:50 Before he took over YC, he was an investor. Wouldn’t make a large investment without meeting all of the founders direct reports - this was incredibly high signal. 27:30 THE TEAM YOU BUILD IS THE COMPANY YOU BUILD (company is only as good as its people). A good judge of a founder’s ability to recruit is to ask yourself, “How tempted would I be to join the company?” The founders that are naturally great recruiters leave everyone that they ever meet with a feeling that they should go join that company, in any context.

+ 4:20 love vs like 8:35 Lunch + 12:29 choosing investors

Sam altman is a legend

Great interview! Chocked full of valuable insights.

A farm is the correct analogy.

26:45 vinod khosla!

maaan!!

Why is Sam wearing those icky red sneakers? Not his color at all.