Founders Quotes - Page 11

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

  Sam Altman

  Team, Perfect, Seems

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• Many of the best YC companies have had phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders.

  Sam Altman

  Team, Small Numbers, Years

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

  Sam Altman

  Team, Underestimate, Recruit

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• Really dig into projects people have worked on and call references; that is another thing that first time founders like to skip.

  Sam Altman

  Team, People, Firsts

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• Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.

  Sam Altman

  Team, Thinking, Employee

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

  Sam Altman

  Team, Forget, Employee

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• I think the best thing you can do is be aware that as a first time founder you are likely to be a very bad manager.

  Sam Altman

  Team, Thinking, Firsts

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

  Sam Altman

  Team, Fire, Long

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• We pretty much won't fund a company now where the founders don't have vested equity because it's just that hard to do.

  Sam Altman

  Team, Equity, Company

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

  Sam Altman

  Successful, Ideas, Looks

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• We hear again and again from founders, that they wish they had waited to start a startup until they came up with an idea they really loved.

  Sam Altman

  Ideas, Wish, Again And Again

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

  Sam Altman

  Team, Two, Twenties

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

  Sam Altman

  Team, Solo, Stills

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• Former Enron founder Ken Lay and CEO Jeffrey Skilling found guilty in the Enron case. Ken Lay is so guilty I'm surprised people aren't calling him Congressman Ken Lay. Wait 'till these guys find out in prison that insider trading has a whole new meaning.

  Jay Leno

  People, Guy, Waiting

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• The Founders believed that pluralism survived only within the concept of religious liberty espoused by American Christianity.

  David Barton

  Christian, Religious, Liberty

  David Barton (2013). “Original Intent: The Courts, the Constitution, and Religion”, p.30, BookBaby

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• I was the Specials' founder, main songwriter and keyboard player.

  Jerry Dammers

  Player

  "I founded the Specials, and now they've excluded me" by Jerry Dammers, www.theguardian.com. March 3, 2009.

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• It is best to lay our plans widely in youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract our views afterward. Youths so laid out, with broad avenues and parks, that they may make handsome and liberal old men! Show me a youth whose mind is like some Washington city of magnificent distances, prepared for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be realized. I trust that every New England boy will begin by laying out a Keene Street through his head, eight rods wide.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Distance, Ambition, Successful

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “HENRY DAVID THOREAU – The Man, The Philosopher & The Trailblazer (Illustrated): Biographies, Memoirs, Autobiographical Books & Personal Letters (Including Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada…)”, p.932, e-artnow

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• Saud bin Abd al-Aziz was the moon-faced, shortsighted, bespectacled son of the old founder of Saudi Arabia, who'd always been his father's protege but had never quite lived up to everything that his father had.

  Robert Lacey

  Father, Son, Moon

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• I'm still one who says that we can get rid of the Internal Revenue Service if we would pass the fair tax, which is a tax on consumption rather than a tax on people's income, and move power back where the founders believed it should have been all along.

  Mike Huckabee

  Moving, Should Have, People

  Mike Huckabee at GOP primary debate at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, www.washingtonpost.com. August 6, 2015.

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• The people who started the American government, the founders of the Constitution, didn't like political parties but they were forced to start them. Nobody ever created political parties in England, they evolved. And there do tend to be two general tendencies that focus around how much government you think you need.

  Barney Frank

  Party, Thinking, Government

  "The Political Scene: Barney's Frank Opinions". Interview with Michael Guerriero, www.newyorker.com. December 9, 2011.

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• You have to be intense. This only comes from the CEO, this only comes from the founders.

  Sam Altman

  Intense, Ceo

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• Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.

  Sam Altman

  Talking, Decision, Never Quit

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• The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. They get things done really quickly.

  Sam Altman

  Moving, Done, Seems

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

  Sam Altman

  Team, Track, Records

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

  Sam Altman

  Important, Starting, Knows

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