Sam Quotes

For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.

It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.

You also really want to take the time to think about how the market is going to evolve.You need a market that's going to be big in 10 years.

You also want to fire people who a) create office politics, and b) who are persistently negative.

At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to.

One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.

If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it.

You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand.

You want to think about what is the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows.

Unpopular but right is what you're going for.

Stay focused and don't try to do too many things at once. Care about execution quality.

If it works out, you're going to be working on this for 10 years.

You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.

You have to let your team get all the credit for all the good stuff that happens, and you take responsibility for the bad stuff.

Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality.

In the early days of a startup, people's compensation is whatever you negotiate with a founder and it's all over the place.

Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. This is probably in the top three secrets of executing well.

If someone is choosing between joining McKinsey or your startup it's very unlikely they're going to work out at the startup.

Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building, the ones that do have a huge advantage.

There are 3 things I look for when I hire people. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?

Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.

Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.

Long term thinking is so rare anywhere, but especially in startups. This is a huge advantage if you do it.

The second part of how to hire: try not to.

Great execution towards a terrible idea will get you nowhere.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.

Remember that you are more likely to die because you execute badly than get crushed by a competitor.

You should think about for the next 10 years, you're going to be giving out 3-5% of the company every year.

You want an idea about what you can say. I know it sounds like a bad idea but here's specifically why its actually a great one. You want to sound crazy but you want to ask to be right.

You want to sound crazy, but you want to actually be right.

... and you can only have 2 or 3 things everyday, because everything else will just come at you; you know fires in a day.

Investors will sort of like write the check and then, despite a lot of promises, don't usually do that much; sometimes they do.

If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards.

In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.

Good startups usually take 10 years.

There's at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people that are willing to put in the effort to execute them well.

We talk to a team they've gotten new things done, that's the best predictor we have that a company will be successful.

Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.

The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.

In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.

Companies that I've been very involved with, that have had a very bad first hire in the first 3 or so employees never recover from it.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It's easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.

You should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what they do.

It's become popular in recent years to say that the idea doesn't matter.

One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them.

Most of the best hires that I've made in my entire life have never done that thing before.

... you can think about that for everyone you hire: will I bet the future of this company on this single hire? And that's a tough bar.

For early employees you want people that have somewhat of a risk-taking attitude.

You have to save the vision speeches for when the company is winning. When you're not winning, you just have to get momentum back.

... you want to be proud of how much you can get done with a small numbers of employees.