Sam Altman has said the best advice he can give any founder is to spend a third of their time recruiting. Not a tenth. A third. He considers hiring the single highest-leverage activity a CEO can do, and at both Y Combinator and OpenAI, he has practiced what he preaches.
"After figuring out your vision, the first and most important thing you need to do is hire the best people. Spend more time on this than anything else."
His most cited hiring principle is to hire for slope, not intercept. Someone's rate of improvement matters more than where they are today. A person who is learning rapidly and has demonstrated exceptional output will surpass someone with a decade more experience but a flat growth curve. He learned this at Y Combinator, where the best founders were almost never the most credentialed.
"Hire for slope, not intercept. A steep learning curve beats a high starting point every time."
Altman looks for intrinsic motivation above almost everything else. Side projects, open-source contributions, things people built without being asked or paid. The work nobody assigned is the truest signal of what someone actually cares about. He draws a sharp line between people who can talk about ideas and people who can actually ship.
"Mediocre hires are worse than no hire at all. They don't just produce mediocre work. They drive away the great people who refuse to work alongside mediocrity."
He also believes the best people are almost never actively looking for jobs. You find them through networks, through referrals from your strongest employees, and by building a reputation that pulls exceptional talent toward you. Recruiting, in Altman's view, is a sales job. You are selling the mission and the team, not filtering through applicants.