Sam Altman: “Most founders get delegation wrong”

July 17, 2025

“People get delegation wrong one way or the other. Every founder knows that as you scale the company, you need to delegate. But they either do way too much or way too little. And it’s actually quite difficult to do it the right balance.”

Most founders Sam saw at Y Combinator would delegate too little because they got burned once early on and it took them a long time to trust that delegation can work again.

But, as Sam explains, founders can also delegate too much:

“Their board member tells them, ‘Hey, you’ve got to delegate. You need these five VPs for these five areas.’ And probably whatever is the area that you think is most important to the business and you enjoy the most, you shouldn’t hire the VP in that area. You should just do it yourself. If you’re a product person and you really love product, don’t hire a VP of product. Keep doing that. Because if you hire a VP of product, you will have never-ending conflict because you both want the same thing. You won’t like the way they do it. They won’t like you’re interfering with them.”

Sam continues:

“Whatever you think the critical piece of the business is - the one or maybe two most critical pieces - hold on to those yourself. That will also make you better about delegating everything else so that you can focus on what you really want to focus on.”