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I’m very excited to share that I’m investing in reddit (personally, not via Y Combinator). I have been a daily reddit user for 9 years—longer than pretty much any other service I still use...
Sam Altman
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Visit blog.samaltman.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2013 – Apr 2026
Tech Industry & Business 79Startups 36Society, Policy & Culture 27Life, Learning & Writing 16Career & Management 14AI & Machine Learning 7
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Hard Startups
The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or...
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The Tech Bust of 2015
Maybe instead of a tech bubble, we’re in a tech bust. No one seems to fervently believe tech valuations are cheap, so it’d be somewhat surprising if we were in a bubble. In many parts of the...
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Idea Generation
The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea...
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Startup advice, briefly
This is a very short summary with lots left out—here is the long version: http://startupclass.samaltman.com You should start with an idea, not a company. When it’s just an idea or project,...
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Hard Tech is Back
First of all, congrats to Kyle, Dan, and the rest of the Cruise team. You all have made amazing progress and we look forward to seeing more in the future. A popular criticism of Silicon Valley,...
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How to Invest in Startups
There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor. Before going any further, I should point out that this is a...
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FarmLogs
I recently got to be a guest at a FarmLogs board meeting. I was struck by how much of an impact the company was having on the world, and how just a couple of years ago it seemed like they were...
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YC Annual Letter 2017
Dear YC Community: In response to a comment on Hacker News, I’m going to try writing an annual letter to the YC community with an update on our progress. Our mission is to enable the most...
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Super successful companies
I spent some time recently thinking about what companies that grow up to be extremely successful do when they are very young. I came up with the following list. It’s from personal experience and...
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Unit Economics
Commentators are looking hard for what’s wrong with startups in Silicon Valley. First they talked about valuations being too high. Then they talked about valuations not really meaning anything. ...
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A new team at Reddit
Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit. The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t...
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A founder-friendly term sheet
When I invest (outside of YC) I make offers with the following term sheet. I’ve tried to make the terms reflect what I wanted when I was a founder. A few people have asked me if I’d share it, so...
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Before Growth
We tell startups all the time that they have to grow quickly. That’s true, and very good advice, but I think the current fashion of Silicon Valley startups has taken this to an unhealthy...
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New RFS – Breakthrough Technologies
We’d like for Y Combinator to fund more breakthrough technology companies—companies that solve an important problem, have a very long time horizon, and are based on an underlying technological or...
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The Worst Part of YC
We are going to send out YC summer 2014 interview decisions (both yes and no) before 10 pm PDT tonight. The worst part of our job at YC is rejecting companies. It leaves me feeling down for many...
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Startup advice
In honor of the new YC batch starting tomorrow, here is some of the best startup advice I’ve heard or given (mostly heard): 1. Make something people want. 2. A great team and a great...
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The Post-YC Slump
At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a...
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Why Silicon Valley Works
I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require...
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'We're in a Bubble'
A lot of people have been saying we’re in a tech bubble for quite some time. Someday they’ll be right, but in the meantime, I thought it'd be fun to look back at some articles from the last 10...
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Projects and Companies
In the early days of my startup, I used to get slightly offended when people would refer to it as a “project”. “How’s your project going?” seemed like the asker didn't take us seriously, even...
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Bubble talk
I’m tired of reading about investors and journalists claiming there’s a bubble in tech. I understand that it’s fun to do and easy press, but it’s boring reading. I also understand that it might...
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Financial Misstatements
First-time startup CEOs make a lot of mistakes, mostly due to ignorance. One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator...
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Researchers and Founders
I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these...
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The Merge
A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced...
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Black Swan Seed Rounds
I started seed investing in 2010 (and much more actively in 2012) before becoming a full-time YC partner. In this period, I invested in about 40 companies. So far, five of them are in the “really...
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The Only Way to Grow Huge
All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people. What this means is that if you want to be a great company some day, you have to...
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Valuations
People have been saying that startup valuations are really high for about 3 years now. I myself feel that they are high, but I have no idea when they are likely to change. It’s mostly investors...
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Applying to YC
One of the most common misconceptions startups have about applying to Y Combinator is thinking that they are too early or too late. We have funded companies with only an idea; we’ve funded...
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What to do if a bubble is starting
Maybe now we’re actually in the early stages of a startup bubble. Valuations are trending up again. And no one is talking about a bubble anymore, so it could be happening. Many companies still...