Sam Altman on the qualities of the best founders

December 12, 2023

“The trick to being a great founder… is your ability to be presented with a problem unlike anything you’ve seen before and solve it very quickly.”

When Sam was CEO of Y Combinator, they were looking at 20,000+ companies per year and tracked the founder qualities that correlated with certain startup outcomes. In no particular order, Sam believes the following qualities matter most:

  1. Clarity of vision. “Can the founder explain what they do and why? If the founder can’t explain it clearly to us, then (a) they’re not going to be able to recruit, hire, sell, talk to the press; and (b) it means they’re not the kind of person who is a really clear thinker in general and that’s so important to a business.”

  2. Determination & Passion. “There are founders who don’t take no for an answer and bend the world to their will and those are the ones we want to fund. Then there are founders that every time they run across a small impediment just turn around. Unfortunately you run into so many impediments every day that if you’re the kind of person who just turns around, that’s really a problem. You also have to really believe that what you’re doing is important. The best companies are always mission-oriented.”

  3. Raw intelligence.

  4. The ability to get things done quickly. “It’s not entirely accurate to say that speed and quality of decision-making correlate exactly with startup success but it’s not a bad first approximation. Being quick, 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 are often missing this one trait.”