Altman: Explore widely and cheaply, then ruthlessly cut to top projects
Sam Altman · Sam Altman on Choosing Projects, Creating Value, and Finding Purpose · Y Combinator · Nov 8, 2018 · at 4:16
Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, outlines his heuristic for exploring new ventures, assessing outcomes honestly, and narrowing focus.
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“The fundamental pattern that has always worked for me is take time, explore a lot of things, try a lot of things, try to have like a beginner's mind about what will work and what won't work. But trust your intuitions, pursue a lot of things as cheaply and quickly as possible, and then be very honest with yourself about what's working well and what's not. And then the hard part is cut all the stuff that's not working and focus down and down until you're eventually focused on the one thing that's really working or the two things that are really working.”
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