Sam Altman: “Most people give up on things way too early”

“Knowing when to quit and knowing when to give up on something, there’s no perfect answer to that. It’s really challenging to even get that approximately correct. But I think most people give up on things way too early.”

Sam continues:

“The mistake that most people make — particularly young entrepreneurs — is they try something, it does not immediately work, and after seven weeks, they say, ‘I tried this thing and it’s just not meant to be.’… The satirical version of this are people who are 23 and have started 14 startups because they give up on everyone before it could ever possibly be successful. These things are really hard. They take a really long time. There are a lot of critics. There are a lot of people who say: your thing sucks; it’s going to fail; it’s really stupid.”

There’s also what Y Combinator calls “The Trough of Sorrow” where, as Sam describes, “no one even decides to say it sucks because no one cares at all. And that is at least as demotivating.”

But this doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work.

Sam explains:

“Most of the founders that I have spent a lot of time with that have gone on to be super successful spent a very long time on their idea when a lot of other people would have given up. Either people said it sucks, or people said nothing about it at all. And a framework that I have for when to give up versus when to keep working is that it should be an internal, rather than an external, decision. If people aren’t using it or people are saying it’s bad, that alone is not a reason to give up. You want to pay some attention to that — they might be right. But the best entrepreneurs I know make an internal decision about when to give up or when to keep working on something. It’s basically: when you have run out of ideas, and something is not working, then it is a good time to stop.”

Full video: Y Combinator “Sam Altman : How to Build the Future“ (Sep 2016)