If a company is profitable, the founder is in control. If it's not, investors are in control.
Sam AltmanRead
People always make the mistake of calling an idea small or stupid because they don't understand how it's going to evolve.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the importance of being open-minded about ideas, no matter how insignificant they may seem initially.
Sam Altman emphasizes that many people often dismiss ideas as small or foolish simply because they do not grasp their potential for future development. This reflects a common tendency to judge things superficially without recognizing the capacity for growth and innovation that can emerge from seemingly trivial concepts.
In practice
In a brainstorming session, to encourage team members to share all ideas without fear of judgment.
If a company is profitable, the founder is in control. If it's not, investors are in control.
It's so important for startups to get their culture right at the start. They need to feel unique and that they are on their own important mission in the world.
If you have the opportunity to go be an early employee at a company that's just going crazy, and you believe it's the next Facebook or Google, you should go join that company.
Seed investing is the status symbol of Silicon Valley. Most people don't want Ferraris, they want a winning seed investment.
Technology magnifies differences, and it's been replacing or obviating jobs for a long time. But what happens as that case accelerates? I'm not one of these doomsayers who says, 'There will be no jobs.'
All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.
Wherever you are is the perfect place to awaken. This moment is the exact place to practice compassion and loving awareness. You have all the ingredients to breathe and find freedom just where you are.
Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.
When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.
I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.
How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live 'em.
Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.
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