Altman: Undocumented startup practices degrade into random oral tradition at scale
Sam Altman · Later Stage Advice with Sam Altman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 20) · Y Combinator · May 1, 2017 · at 8:03
Sam Altman delivers advice on late-stage startup management during a 2014 Stanford lecture.
“If you write it down and put it up on a wiki or whatever that every employee reads you as the founder get to basically write the law. And if you write this down, it will become law in the company. And if you make everyone read this, as the company hires a hundred and then a thousand employees, people will read this and say, all right, that's how we do things. If you don't do it, it'll be like random oral tradition of whatever the hiring manager or their best friend that they make it, their first week in the, at the company tells them.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →