Sam Altman: “Most people give up on things way too early”

Knowing when to quit and knowing when to give up on something is. There's no perfect answer to that, but it's really challenging to even get that approximately correct. I think most people give up on things way too early. So the mistake that most people make is they try something, it does not immediately work. You see this particularly in young entrepreneurs. It does not immediately work. After seven weeks, they say, you know what? I tried this thing, it's just not meant to be, and I have too many other projects. And so they immediately give up. And you kind of, you know, the satirical version of this is people that are 23 and have started 14 startups because they give up on everyone before it could ever possibly be successful. These things are really hard. They take a very long time. There are a lot of critics, there are a lot of people who say, this thing sucks, it's going to fail, it's really stupid. And then also there's like, what at yc, we call the trough of sorrow, where no one even bothers to say it sucks because no one cares at all. And that is at least as demotivating. Most of the founders that I have spent a lot of time with that have gone on to be super successful spent a very long time on their idea when a lot of other people would have given up. And either people said it sucks or people said nothing at all. And a framework that I have for when to give up and when to keep working is it should be an internal, not an external decision. If people aren't using it or if people are saying it's bad, that alone is not a reason to give up. You want to pay some attention to that, they might be right. But I think the best entrepreneurs I know, they make an internal decision about when to give up or when to keep working on something. It's basically when you have run out of ideas and something is not working, then it's a good time to stop.