More Words of Wisdom from Sam Altman

by Scott Edward Walker on February 13th, 2016

Sam Altman startup

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we post a favorite video clip of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we again present Sam Altman, the President of Y Combinator and the former co-founder and CEO of Loopt.

In this interesting speech at PlatziConf Mexico in May 2015, Sam shares some solid advice for founders and startups, including the following:

  • Startups “need to build a product that users love.” (at 0:21)
  • “It’s more important to build something that a few users love rather than something that a lot of users like.” (at 0:30)
  • “The startups that go on to be huge…have early users that would be really, really disappointed if their product went away.” (at 1:50)
  • “You want a startup idea where if you win then you’re going to stay the winner.” (at 3:13)
  • “All startups are deeply broken on the inside… All startups have problems.” (at 4:46)
  • “Team problems are the biggest killer of startups inside of YC.” (at 5:39)
  • “It’s really important as a startup to remain frugal.” (at 7:30)
  • “The best startups are very focused and very intense.” (at 8:35)
  • “The only thing you can’t do is create a market that doesn’t want to exist.” (at 10:36)
  • “The very best startups ideas sound bad, but are good.” (at 11:08)
  • “The founders that we have funded that have been most successful are working on an idea that they themselves understand very well.” (at 12:26)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott

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