Sam Quotes

I had luck, but I worked hard and I suffered. It's not just photography I'm talking about. It's about whatever dream you want it to be.

The best lesson I was given is that all of life teaches, especially if we have that expectation.

The unusual wins out over the usual.

Richard Prince's most famous photograph was made by me.

I would like to go to Antarctica. That's about all.

I'm very involved in photographing America now, so I don't think of faraway places, as I did when I was young.

[ My time and our common culture] it's what I'm photographing, and I'm very involved with that.

My least favorite photographer to have would be myself. Someone who wanted a career at National Geographic. Because it's almost mathematically impossible to achieve that.

Typically I see it with photographers who go to a place like India or Nepal, and everything's so colorful and exotic and they think, therefore, a picture's been taken.

There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing.

Aboriginal Australia is a tough place to work, rough and tough.

Teaching has never been far from my life. It's the most natural thing I do. Apparently, as I said, I cannot not do it.

I had a book come out several years ago, when there were no blogs. This is a mark to me about how the environment has changed.

It actually has transcended my career at the Geographic, so that when my career there ended, I had momentum as a teacher, and a belief in photographic education at the workshop level.

The longer we lived with it the more we wanted something less about process and more about life.

Increasingly, it's people not interested in National Geographic.

Even though I teach with 35mm, my method takes people by surprise, because it isn't fast, and it isn't about hardware or software, or even great results. It's about great process.

It's better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it's still bad to be a solo founder.

In general, it's best if you're building something that you yourself need.

Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you'll probably end up in a pretty good place.

The best source by far for hiring is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know.

You should be giving out a lot of equity to your employees.

More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.

It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with.

You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.

If you can just learn to think about the market first, you will have a big leg up on most people starting startups.

Every first time founder waits too long, everyone hopes that an employee will turn around. But the right answer is to fire fast.

Most things are not as risky as they seem.

Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. Not to hire.

Two other things that we hear again and again from our founders, they wish they had done earlier, and that is... simply writing down how you do things and why you do things.

One thing I tell startups all the time is that the best way to grow is to make their product better.

Great execution is at least 10 times more important and a 100 times harder than a good idea.

A board member of mine used to say sales fix everything in a startup, and that is really true.

The company just needs to see you as like this maniacal execution machine.

You never want to be in a place where an employee has vested 3 out of the 4 years of stock and they start thinking about leaving.

Why now, why is this the perfect time for this particular idea, and to start this particular company?

If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.

If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it's almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated.

... for the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.

You really want to know your cofounders for a while, ideally years.

A lot of people treat choosing their cofounder with even less importance than they put on hiring. Don't do this.

To get the very best people- they have a lot of great options, and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone.

Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.

The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.

I care much more about the growth rate of the market than it's current size and I also care if there's any reason it's going to top out.

Why couldn't it have been done 2 years ago, and why will 2 years in the future be too late?

You cannot create a market that doesn't want to exist.

If you look at successful pivots, they almost always are a pivot into something that the founder wanted. Not a random made up idea.

Keep salaries low and equity high. Keep the organization as flat as you can.

You should always know how you're doing against your metrics. You should always have a weekly review meeting every week.