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Sam Altman: Build the Fastest Iterating Company the World Has Ever Seen

By Sam Altman · Startup Growth · 2 min read

Make it one of your top goals to build the fastest iterating company the world has ever seen. If you can get 2% better every iteration cycle — and your cycle is every 4 hours instead of 4 weeks — compound that over a few years. Very different places.

Key Points

Build the fastest iterating company ever — 2% better every cycle compounds enormously
Stay lean until everything works, then scale like a battleship
Dustin Moskovitz spends 50% of his time on recruiting and retaining. If he can, you should.

If you can get 2% better every iteration cycle and your cycle is every 4 hours instead of 4 weeks — compound that over a few years. Very different places.

The Fastest Iterating Company Ever

Altman: The cycle is: talk to customer, understand pain, build product, get it in front of a user, see what they do, repeat. If you can get 2% better every iteration cycle — and you have a chance of having that cycle be every 4 hours or every 4 weeks — compound that over a few years. You get in very, very different places.

Make it one of your top goals to build the fastest iterating company the world has ever seen.

2% better every cycle. Every 4 hours vs every 4 weeks. Compound that. Very different places.

Speedboat First, Battleship Later

Altman: Stay lean until everything is working really well. In the early days you want to be a fast speedboat — turn the whole company on a dime. The flexibility of a company decreases with the square of the number of employees.

Once things are working — users begging for your product, great product-market fit — then switch into hyperscale mode. Get as big as fast as you can with great people. Now you want to be a battleship. Steamroll everything.

Early: speedboat, turn on a dime. After PMF: battleship, steamroll everything.

Dustin Moskovitz Spends 50% on Hiring

Altman: The team you build is the company you build. Dustin Moskovitz doesn't need to do anything he doesn't want to do — and he chooses to spend half his time recruiting and retaining employees. If Dustin can do that, you probably should too.

Every CEO I've met has an excuse for why they only spend 5% of their time building their team. It always sounds really good. And then they always fail.

Dustin spends 50% on hiring. Every CEO who spends 5% has a great excuse. They always fail.

The 10-Year Commitment

Altman: Make a long-term commitment. These things always take almost 10 years if they're going to work. This is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market — almost no one makes a very long-term commitment to a new project. If you do, you will think differently, hire differently, and it'll work really well.

Startups are about not giving up to a degree that most people don't have a good intuitive understanding for. One of the best companies in the last YC batch — he applied seven times before he got in.

Almost no one commits long-term. That's the only arbitrage opportunity left.