Hard Startups - Sam Altman

Be bold

I believe that it’s easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup. People want to be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters.

If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you rea... See more

I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter.

The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners. It means the probability of a startup making it really big is not merely not a constant fraction of the probability that it will succeed, but that the startups with a high probability of the former will seem to have a disproportionately low probabili... See more

Sam Altman What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in

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startups represent the wizardry of building something out of nothing. That is hard to do. And to do it very well is harder than the average job.

A startup miracle is the key difficult thing you need to pull off for your startup to work. If your startup requires zero miracles to succeed, it probably isn't a defensible startup. If your startup requires multiple miracles, you are multiplying a low probability event to get even smaller expected outcomes.