Sam Altman on building a big company “At some point people have to spontaneously tell their friends”

This is sort of YC's mantra, but it's so important that I wanted to talk about it again. The best companies all have great products. Unfortunately, the current fashion in Silicon Valley I think has gone a little bit too away from this. And it's too much about growth hacking and sales and marketing machines and everything else. And that does work for a while. You know, you can get away actually for a pretty long while by executing really well to grow a mediocre product. But you don't usually create like a Facebook sized company by doing that. And here is the very simple framework I use for this. If I think about all of the most successful Internet mobile startups, I heard about those. This is like true for enterprise and consumer apps. I heard about those because they were so good that one of my friends spontaneously told me about it. They were not being incentivized to. They didn't market to me, they didn't advertise to me. It was just like someone I trusted said, you gotta try this new thing, it's amazing. And if the startup is not gonna get there, I think they will not be at that number one spot on your power law of returns. So I think this is like a really important filter.