Sam Altman Quotes

Life is not a dress rehearsal—this is probably it. Make it count. Time is extremely limited and goes by fast. Do what makes you happy and fulfilled—few people get remembered hundreds of years after they die anyway. Don’t do stuff that doesn’t make you happy (this happens most often when other people want you to do something). Don’t spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don’t like, and cut negative people out of your life. Negativity is really bad. Don’t let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.

In the words of Henry Ford: "The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

A successful startup takes a very long time—certainly much longer than most founders think at the outset. You cannot treat it as an all-nighter. You have to eat well, sleep well, and exercise. You have to spend time with your family and friends. You also need to work in an area you’re actually passionate about—nothing else will sustain you for ten years.

there are at least a thousand times more people that have good ideas than people who are willing to do the kind of work it takes to turn a great idea into a great company.

The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift. Most people want to be accepted, so they won’t take risks that could make them look crazy—which actually makes them wildly miscalculate risk.

If you can't figure out what kind of work you like, pay attention to what's easy to concentrate on and gives you energy vs. what makes you tune out and feel tired.

What I’ve found works best for me personally is a pen-and-paper list for each day with ~3 major tasks and ~30 minor ones, and an annual to-do list of overall goals.)

Founders that are hard to talk to are almost always bad.

So all you need is a great idea, a great team, a great product, and great execution. So easy! ;)

We have noticed the most successful founders are the sort of people who are low-stress to work with because you feel “he or she will get it done, no matter what it is.” Sometimes you can succeed through sheer force of will.

But ignoring those details won’t work—not in the long run, says Y Combinator’s president from 2014 to 2019, Sam Altman. An acolyte of Paul Graham’s, Sam adhered to the core Y Combinator dictum: It’s better to have one hundred users who love you than a million users who just kind of like you. It’s counterintuitive. You may be thinking If a million people “kind of like” my product enough to buy it, isn’t that better for business than a hundred obsessive oddballs? To which Sam would say…definitely not.

It’s important that you distort reality for others but not yourself. You have to convince other people that your company is primed to be the most important startup of the decade, but you yourself should be paranoid about everything that could go wrong.

So it’s better not to try too actively to force yourself to come up with startup ideas. Instead, learn about a lot of different things. Practice noticing problems, things that seem inefficient, and major technological shifts. Work on projects you find interesting. Go out of your way to hang around smart, interesting people. At some point, ideas will emerge.

Let yourself occasionally get a little screwed in exchange for not having to live with your guard up all the time. It’s worth it.

one of the greatest skills of a leader is the ability to calm others in a storm

Nectome is one of the handful of start-ups chosen to be part of Y Combinator, the most important of California’s tech incubators. (They’re the people who first championed Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit.) In fact, Y Combinator head Sam Altman has already plunked down his $10,000 for Nectome’s service,

don't do the deferred life plan

we can figure that out, including how to talk about it in a way that Americans will understand and support, that will be both good policy and good politics. There’s another angle to consider as well. Technologists like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates, and physicists like Stephen Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence could one day pose an existential security threat. Musk has called it “the greatest risk we face as a civilization.” Think about it: Have you ever seen a movie where the machines start thinking for themselves that ends well? Every time I went out to Silicon Valley during the campaign, I came home more alarmed about this. My staff lived in fear that I’d start talking about “the rise of the robots” in some Iowa town hall. Maybe I should have. In any case, policy makers need to keep up with technology as it races ahead, instead of always playing catch-up.

Sam Altman is the current president of Y-Combinator and was previously a founder at Loopt, which sold to Green Dot Corporation for $ 43M. As head of YC, Sam often dispenses an entire guide’s worth of information through his blog. Sam’s “Startup Playbook” will walk you through everything a great startup should have from ideation to product instantiation, and is an invaluable tool for aspiring venture investors. Additionally, Sam’s been kind enough to host the 20-episode video series, How to Start a Startup—originally a lecture at Stanford—on his blog. The series includes talks from luminaries like Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.

If there are ten other companies starting at the same time with the same plan, and it sounds a whole lot like something that already exists, we are skeptical.

What makes a great founder? The most important characteristics are ones like unstoppability, determination, formidability, and resourcefulness. Intelligence and passion also rank very highly.

Your goal as a startup is to make something users love. If you do that, then you have to figure out how to get a lot more users.

It’s much better to first make a product a small number of users love than a product that a large number of users like.

To have a successful startup, you need: a great idea (including a great market), a great team, a great product, and great execution.

One of the first things we ask YC companies is what they’re building and why.

When Brian Chesky was pitching venture capitalists to invest in Airbnb, one of the people he consulted was the entrepreneur and investor Sam Altman, who later became the president of the Y Combinator start-up accelerator. Altman saw Chesky’s pitch deck and told him it was perfect, except that he needed to change the market-size slide from a modest $ 30 million to $ 30 billion. “Investors want B’s, baby,” Altman told Chesky. Of course, Altman wasn’t telling Chesky to lie; rather, he argued that if the Airbnb team truly believed in their own assumptions, $ 30 million was a gross underestimate, and they should use a number that was true to their convictions. As it turns out, Airbnb’s market was indeed closer to $ 30 billion.

A CEO has to 1) set the vision and strategy for the company, 2) evangelize the company to everyone, 3) hire and manage the team, especially in areas where you yourself have gaps 4) raise money and make sure the company does not run out of money, and 5) set the execution quality bar.

Being a CEO is lonely. It’s important to have relationships with other CEOs you can call when everything is melting down (one of the important accidental discoveries of YC was a way for founders to have peers.)

One mistake that CEOs often make is to innovate in well-trodden areas of business instead of innovating in new products and solutions. For example, many founders think that they should spend their time discovering new ways to do HR, marketing, sales, financing, PR, etc. This is nearly always bad. Do what works in the well-established areas, and focus your creative energies on the product or service you’re building.

Don’t move to Silicon Valley. Even before 2020, I would have said, “Don’t quit your job, don’t move to SF, don’t pass go, and don’t collect $200 (from VCs).” After all, San Francisco is expensive, traffic-heavy, and not a great place to raise your children—or even a dog. Now, post-COVID, remote work is the new normal, and that means you can stay where you are. Sam Altman, the former CEO of Y Combinator, said that he was “very excited to see SF have to compete with other cities.” Me too. Not only is it cheaper and less competitive to build your company in a smaller town or city, but it’s also better for the local community, which as we’ve learned can pay dividends for your business.

What makes a great founder? The most important characteristics are ones like unstoppability, determination, formidability, and resourcefulness. Intelligence and passion also rank very highly. These are all much more important than experience and certainly “expertise with language X and framework Y”.

This is all a dream. And in the dream, anything is possible.

No matter how successful you are, the haters will never go away.

By the way, “product” includes all interactions a user has with the company.

I have for a very long time believed that energy and intelligence are the two most important things,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much they fit together. I got totally lucky on that.

In retrospect, one of the most interesting questions is, how on earth could such a talented group work on such an intractable problem for so long that was never going to be solved? It turns out that the demand for this service, this product that Loopt was building, never manifested. And pre-smartphones it was never going to because the idea that you can have a critical mass of people who use this service, when you had to deploy it on literally one hundred different types of devices on five, six or seven different mobile networks was, in retrospect, kind of ludicrous.

If you’re the founder of the company and you wanted to work one hundred hours a week and be super focused and productive that’s cool, but most other people you hire, especially as you get bigger, have other lives and you need to understand that.”18

On Musk’s list of recommended books was Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, in which Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom argues

Sam’s mother, Connie Gibstine, bequeathed her son both her family’s “science brain” and her own ferocious work ethic. Jerry and Connie’s daily affirmations that Sam and his siblings could be whatever they wanted to be helped fuel Sam’s confidence and optimism. At the same time, within their ultimately unhappy marriage lie many of the seeds of Altman’s own self-professed history of anxiety and the rift that led his sister, Annie, to break off contact with the rest of her family after Jerry died in 2018.

Shortly after ChatGPT was released, he tweeted that one thing he believes that few others do is the “absolute equivalence of brahman and atman.”15 Advaita, which roughly means nondualism, holds that there is no difference between Brahman (the eternal consciousness that is the fabric of all reality) and Atman (the individual soul or self), and that the world that we experience is an illusory manifestation of Brahman. “I’m certainly willing to believe that consciousness is somehow the fundamental substrate and we’re all just in the dream or the simulation or whatever,” Altman told podcaster Lex Fridman. “I think it’s interesting how much the Silicon Valley religion of the simulation has gotten close to Brahman and how little space there is between them.”16 In other words: This is all a dream. And in the dream, anything is possible.

Altman learned a fundamental lesson from the deal: “The way to get things done is to just be really fucking persistent.”3

Winer recalls clearly his brush with Altman, all these years later. “Anyone who came across him at that time wished they had some of what he had. There was a sense that anything was possible. He’s quite optimistic—decisive and optimistic. Rarely is he skeptical about anything.

They built something that could be built in a weekend.” Loopt, by contrast, had to build custom APIs for each wireless company to have access to location information, and negotiate deals for access to each one. Bored and unable to use his scaling skills, Jacobstein decided to move on.

The way to get things done is to just be really fucking persistent.

Sprint PCS charged five dollars for “picture mail,” but users first had to sign up for fifteen-dollar mobile data subscription to use it.

original ideas are among the rarest commodities in the world.

Perhaps the biggest change came during a weekend-long retreat he spent in Mexico taking psychedelics with a guide. “It was one of the most transformative things in my life,” he told the San Francisco Standard’s Life in Seven Songs podcast.8 Mostly, he spent a lot of time in Big Sur, amid the redwoods by the sea, the landscape on the planet that most appealed to him, and read books. “I felt like I knew a little bit about everything and felt like everything was possible,” he said. “I felt very uncertain, but very good.

In the simplest terms, empires amassed extraordinary riches across space and time, through imposing a colonial world order, at great expense to everyone else.

Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Ever more power will shift from labor to capital.

OpenAI had grown competitive, secretive, and insular, even fearful of the outside world under the intoxicating power of controlling such a paramount technology. Gone were notions of transparency and democracy, of self-sacrifice and collaboration. OpenAI executives had a singular obsession: to be the first to reach artificial general intelligence, to make it in their own image.

We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions,” they wrote. If another attempt to create beneficial AGI surpassed OpenAI’s progress, “we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project.

It triggered the very race to the bottom that it had warned about, massively accelerating the technology’s commercialization and deployment without shoring up its harmful flaws or the dangerous ways that it could amplify and exploit the fault lines in our society.

Under the hood, generative AI models are monstrosities, built from consuming previously unfathomable amounts of data, labor, computing power, and natural resources.

Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires.

predetermined. But the question of governance returns: Who will get to shape them?

The number of independent researchers not affiliated with or receiving funding from the tech industry has rapidly dwindled, diminishing the diversity of ideas in the field not tied to short-term commercial benefit.

Luck isn’t an independent variable but increases super-linearly with more surface area—you meet more people, make more connections between new ideas, learn patterns,” said entrepreneur and investor Sam Altman.