What I Wish Someone Had Told Me | Sam Altman (CEO, OpenAi)
by Joe · 25 things on Twos
- 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 the short term, which will get easier over time.
- It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn't really matter.
- Audacious ideas motivate people.
- Incentives are superpowers. Set them carefully.
- Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets;
- This is easy to say but evidently hard to do.
- You can delete more stuff than you think.
- Communicate clearly and concisely.
- Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too.
- Do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.
- Outcomes are what count. Don't let good process excuse bad results.
- Spend more time recruiting. Take risks on high-potential people with a fast rate of improvement. Look for evidence of getting stuff done in addition to intelligence.
- Superstars are even more valuable than they seem, but you have to evaluate people on their net impact on the performance of the organization.
- Fast iteration can make up for a lot; it's usually ok to be wrong it you iterate quickly.
- Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.
- Don't fight the business equivalent of the laws of physics.
- Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.
- Scale often has surprising emergent properties.
- Compounding exponentials are magic. In particular, you really want to build a business that gets a compounding advantage with scale.
- Get back up and keep going.
- Working with great people is one of the best parts of life.