Sam Altman on the qualities of the best founders

We actually have tracked this over years and we rate founders on different qualities, and so we see what seems to matter in no particular order. The sort of ones I'd say are incredibly important. Clarity of vision. Can the founder explain exactly what they do and why? If the founder can't explain it clearly to us, then, A, they're never going to be able to recruit, hire, sell, talk to the press, anything, and B, it means they're not the kind of person that is a really clear thinker in general, and that's just so important to a business. Clarity on what?

Because a lot of people, a lot of times you don't know exactly what you're starting, when you start, right?

Well, you know, what you're going to go work on in the next few weeks and, you know, kind of why you're doing what you're doing. So, like, you know, with Airbnb, for example, when they, when they applied to yc, they were doing this thing that seemed a little bit hokey to all of us, where you stayed on a stranger's airbed while they were still there. And none of us wanted to do that, but they knew exactly how to do that. They could explain exactly how it worked, why they were doing it. And the vision for the company was that we want. Brian told a story of, well, this is how my grandfather used to travel. And it's a lot better to stay in a local's house and with a local than it is to stay in the four seasons of wherever, which all look somehow exactly the same with one decor element from whatever the city is. So the vision was so clearly articulated, it then took a little while to evolve into exactly what Airbnb is today, which is where you discover that you can just rent out the whole house, the whole apartment. But he was so clear on why he was going to build this and what the end state vision was. And then the short term, like what he currently had to do to make it work. So that's one, two is we look for people that are sort of like, very determined and very passionate about what they're doing. There are founders who don't take no for an answer, and there are founders who just bend the world to their will, and those are the ones who want to fund. And then there are the founders that every time they run across a small impediment, just turn around. Fortunately, you run over so many impediments, run into so many impediments every day, that if you're the kind of person that just turns around at those that's really a problem this. And you also have to really believe that what you're doing is important. The best companies are always somehow mission oriented, even if it's just that the founder loves the idea of building a big company in this space that he or she knows really well. That element is always there. So determination and passion together, that intersection is really important. Obviously raw intelligence, that one is obvious. The ability to get things done quickly. This is not quite the same as determination. There are determined people who are still very slow movers and that works in a lot of things in life. It does not work for founders. It's not entirely accurate to say that speed and quality of decision making correlates exactly with startup success, but it's not like a bad first approximation. Being quick and being decisive and getting things done quickly. If you look at our data, that would just correlate almost exactly with all of our successful founders and other founders that look on paper like they should be really successful but fail often are missing this one trait. And.

How do you judge for that?

Well, this is one of the advantages of operating the scale that we do. We look at 20,000 companies a year, something like that. So we just get so much data that you develop over time, the interview questions to ask and the responses that correlate with different things.

Yeah. Your determination. Have you read the book the Martian?

It's like eighth in my book stack right now.

It's a pretty good book to read. It's this novel about a guy gets marooned on Mars, but it's all problem solving. It's like, okay, I've got to solve this problem, Go do it. And then the side effect of solving that problem means this other thing comes wildly undone, which is a very startupy. It's the best book about startups I've read in a long time. That's the guy on Mars.

The trick to being a great founder, at least in the early stages, and honestly, this kind of goes on forever, is your ability to be presented with a problem unlike anything you've seen before and solve it very quickly. And that there are some people that love that and some.