Everything Sam Altman has said about how to start a startup
Altman argues you should only start a startup when a specific problem compels you, ideally with an idea that sounds bad but is good in a small, fast-growing market. Success then comes down to making a small group of users love the product enough to spread it themselves, and refusing to quit before the work has had time to compound.
6 points · 3 appearances · 2014–2018
How the view evolved
Make a few users love it → Spontaneous word-of-mouth is 80% of success
Same underlying bar, but the framing hardens between 2014 and 2018: in 2014 intense love from a small user group is one prerequisite — the thing to expand from — while by 2018 he restates it as spontaneous word-of-mouth and quantifies it as '80% of the work,' making it the near-definition of startup success rather than step one. A sharpening of emphasis, not a reversal.
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6 points · 2 appearances · 2025
“First of all, you can't ask it anything. That's very nice of you to say, but there's a lot of things that it's still embarrassingly bad at. But even if we fixed those, which hopefully we will, it doesn't continuously learn and improve. It can't go get better at something that it's currently weak at. It can't go discover new science and update its understanding and do that. And it also kind of can't — even if we lower the bar — it can't just sort of do any knowledge work you could do in front of a computer. Even without the sort of ability to get better at something it doesn't know yet, I might accept that as a definition of AGI. But the current systems — you can't say, like, hey, go do this task for my job, and it goes off and clicks around the internet and calls someone and looks at your files and does it. And without that, it feels definitely short of it.”
8 points · 7 appearances · 2019–2025 · changed view
“Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that with the robots as cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth, because you can rent it out — although that's probably a lower use of productivity — but land and actually doing some commercial enterprise. So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.”
5 points · 5 appearances · 2024–2026 · changed view
“The observation is that don't die is the most played game by everyone all over the world every day. You and I breathe every few seconds, we look both ways before we cross the street, we all play don't die. So it's played more than capitalism, it's played more than any religion. It's the most played game in the world.”
6 points · 4 appearances · 2007–2020 · changed view
“Well, you can say everybody knows that. Well, I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”