Sam Altman

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

Intelligence is usually easy to tell in a 10-minute conversation. Determination is harder.

AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.

People always make the mistake of calling an idea small or stupid because they don't understand how it's going to evolve.

I suppose if I didn't have Loopt, I'd have to, I don't know, pick up the phone and just start calling people, a lot more texting and certainly more Googling.

Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.

I always tell my partners that our job is to fund all the companies we can that can be worth $10 billion or more. That's such a difficult constraint, we can't have any other constraints.

Communication services need interoperability to succeed - and Loopt is the first such service since SMS that is available across all major U.S. wireless carriers.

All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.

Many of the companies in the mobile location space are trying to figure out different ways to tie what they're doing to commerce.

I think the mistake people make most often when they invest in other kinds of startups is they say, 'This is totally different.' And so the things that matter, like making a product that people desperately want, like talking to customers, they throw this out the window. That is a recipe for heartache and tears.

Seed investing is the status symbol of Silicon Valley. Most people don't want Ferraris, they want a winning seed investment.