Sam Altman's 10 Best Tips on Raising Startup Capital

Sam Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, was the CEO of Y Combinator, and has personally invested in some of Silicon Valley's greatest companies, such as Stripe, Airbnb, Reddit, Instacart, DoorDash, Uber, Dropbox, Asana, and Pinterest. He has an excellent personal blog. As I was reading it, I picked up ten great quotes by Altman about raising capital for your startup, plus one general piece of startup advice as a bonus. Here goes: 1. Raise money on a promise. Raise money on clean terms. 2. Do reference checks on your potential investors. Ask other founders how they are when everything goes wrong. 3. Investors love companies other investors love. 4. Raise a bit more money than you think you need. 5. ..it’s always possible that the capital you’ve raised now will be the last you’ve ever raised. You should treat it that way. 6. Good investors are worth a reasonable premium. 7. The important thing is to get good investors, clean terms, and not spend too much time fundraising. The biggest problem comes from chasing high valuations... trying to get really high valuations is a mistake. 8. Go for a few highly involved investors over a lot of lightly engaged ones. 9. Anything other than a term sheet is a "no", and all the reasons don’t matter. Move on and talk to other investors. 10. Schleps are good.

The thread that runs through all ten

Read the ten tips together and one theme stands out: speed and quality beat maximum price. Altman keeps steering founders toward clean terms, involved investors and a short fundraising process, because the raise is a means and the company is the end. Every week spent squeezing valuation is a week your competitors spent building.

A practical way to apply this: build a target list of investors who actually match your stage and sector before you start, so the process stays short and every conversation counts. That is exactly what our curated investor lists are for.