Don't get me wrong, I don't think he's a moron or anything, but it's fascinating to me that he doesn't have ANY of the following things that I'd assume makes one qualified: * Published AI research * Sold a company * Worked at a Unicorn or top tech company * Reputation in OSS as a hacker/builder
Surely there's more to the story? Do people who he has advised at YCombinator all agree he's brilliant and insightful? What am I missing?
EDIT: I was wrong, he did sell a company. My mistake!
That does change things, but I'd like to hear more from people who have good things to say about him. Maybe he's given some amazing advice to really important companies that we're unaware of. It would be nice to hear more of how he got his reputation.
> there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.
We discussed nuclear power which was an industry I left but dreamed of building a successful startup in. Sam asked me why I wasn’t building a startup in nuclear power if I thought the technology was so powerful. What I realized in what he was conveying was that if he had the same conviction he would have no doubt about the ability to drive it to success. The more experienced I get the more I value that type of conviction and determination. The more I also see that behavior being rewarded with results.
He dropped out of Stanford in 2005, at 19, to co-found Loopt. Yeah, it ultimately failed, but over 7 years they got 5 million users, raised $30 mil in funding, and were acquihired for $43.4 mil.
He was a YC partner at ~25, YC’s president at ~28, and seemed to do a good job leading it for ~5 years. He’s also been pretty personally successful as an Angel investor.
He was an early investor in OpenAI, left YC a few years ago to become their CEO, and they’ve done extremely well under him.
No, he’s not Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuck, etc., but his accomplishments at 37 are pretty damn good. I’m not really seeing how this is failing upwards?
- Ability to promote a company vision (even if you didn’t invent that vision)
- Ability to recognize and recruit excellent high-level leaders
- Ability to raise money by selling a company vision and instill confidence in investors
- Ability to sell product at the highest levels (e.g manage acquisition, sell to ultra-large organizations, get special gov treatment, whatever “big” sale matters most to the company)
- Ability to crisis manage in the short and long run
As far as I can tell, Sam had a lot of experience in the above in his time at YC and his own startup. On top of this, he had enough connections to get him into the pool of candidates and it looks like a lot of very smart/powerful people in SV are impressed by him when they meet or work with him. Seems like a very good choice to lead to me.
I know it’s Silicon Valley koolaide that good hackers == good CEOs, but it’s not true.
Being in bay area, (being charismatic white male helps), around YC and VC circles, with some traction of previous startup success, it's the perfect place to take high risk, high reward bets.
Bay area is an outlier where you can raise billions of dollars, lose millions per month for decades, incrementally work on a moonshot, that's seen as OK. 1% of successful bets offset the 99% failed. They rain money! Some change the way the world works.
Watching Sama's videos, he has very high conviction on AI, he understands the tech, he is able to get top talent together, he has raised billions in war chest to be a solid contender. I think he makes a fantastic leader.
Cruise is another good example. Kyle Vogt has raised a huge war chest, losing millions a month, far from profitable. However they have driverless cars in SF right now. Other than Waymo and Cruise, no one else has been able to achieve this feat.
The valley is a different beast in that regards. Bottomless capital, high concentration of talent, top tier universities like Stanford and Berkley. It's the place where turning science fiction into reality is highly encouraged.
> Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt, had just finished his sophomore year when we funded them, and Loopt is probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded so far. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking "Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19." http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html
It's too easy to mix up cause and effect here. Was he already visible so good that pg put them there, or is pg infatuation so influential?
There's probably more than what meets the eye. Too bad for us that sama doesn't write as much as pg does.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
and most importantly, from http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
'At YC we spend a lot of time trying to predict how the startups we've funded will do, because we're trying to learn how to pick winners. We've now watched the trajectories of so many startups that we're getting better at predicting them. And when we're talking about startups we think are likely to succeed, what we find ourselves saying is things like "Oh, those guys can take care of themselves. They'll be fine." Not "those guys are really smart" or "those guys are working on a great idea." [6] When we predict good outcomes for startups, the qualities that come up in the supporting arguments are toughness, adaptability, determination. Which means to the extent we're correct, those are the qualities you need to win. 'Investors know this, at least unconsciously. The reason they like it when you don't need them is not simply that they like what they can't have, but because that quality is what makes founders succeed. 'Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you.'
He is also from early batch of YC who co-incidently were very intimately connected with PG.
someone above said zuck was pretty much "luck" which I dont think is true. Even though you might hate him for a lot of things, he is pretty darn smart.
edit add "luck"
it's who you know, not what you know.
EQ is a stronger kung fu than IQ by far. The ability to networking has not only longer lasting effect but greater than any knowledge you can have. I.E. Elon, Zuck, Jobs, Gates etc....
I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this:
"We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious.
We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day.
We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract."
I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person.
Companies can “fail”, for all kinds of reasons, even with perfect execution by the founders. I don’t really know why Loopt failed, but based on sama’s track record since, he is definitely a person who makes a huge impact with whatever he does (even if you think OpenAI hype is overblown, as I do).
I don't know much about Sam Altman, I've read his blog, listened to some of his talks. From what I can see his last few positions have been prominent and related to earlier work... of these roles he has taken he has succeeded in growing the businesses. So it would appear he is probably a good professional manager- a business caretaker. It is a different job than building something from nothing, or producing a difficult technical achievement, but it is an important job. Looking at some numbers (google search), many people rely on him for leadership and decision making, and he has produced good work in those areas. I don't think any of this indicates any level of "failure". And to be honest, if a guy like Sam Altman is considered a failure... I wonder what people would think of me, or other people I admire who do good work but aren't the subject of an incredibly well crafted narrative?
This isn't the first time this has happened. If you want to come out and make insinuations about a person you should at a minimum flesh out your profile and contribute more than just your 'let's discuss this person' posts and even then it is - in my view - bad form.
edit: absolutely hilarious to see this flagged.
When Sam took over YC, it was already well established. He's done little to improve that reputation. As head of YC he secured personal deal flow, made connections, and ended up at OpenAI through those opportunities. What were his qualifications for taking over YC? PG liked him. Why did PG like him so much? Who knows. It wasn't Sam's accomplishments or experience, that's for sure.
Apparently this fondness for Sam was established "3 minutes" after meeting him. When I'm doing interviews and hiring, and the same feeling happens to me? I step back to examine by own bias. For PG? It was just that instant pattern recognition baby. Why question it.
I have a lot of complaints about some people at YC (specifically those who say a lot of stuff about people in private—or even worse, on bookface—that they don't say in public, and engage in other childish cowardly behavior), and for all I know SamA has said sh*t about me behind my back (but I don't have any evidence he has ever done so nor do I suspect it), but in all of my interactions with him, he has been generous with his time and helped me figure out some key decisions (like when I was deciding whether to sell to Microsoft in 2014, he did office hours with me and helped me figure it out).
He's also put out a ton of honest, insightful, unique content out there that I've learned a lot from.
I think PG did him no favors by basically saying he was the Lebron James of startups when he was like 20 years old or something, but surprisingly he did live up to the hype.
Definitely someone who is able to see the forest from the trees and identify where the key roots are and act accordingly.
The bigger question is why so many still believe in the myth of meritocracy [1]. Altman, if he failed upward, is not an isolated incident. It is not.
The common traits of "success" here are more closely aligned to sociopathy and narcissism [2]. Look no further than Elon Musk, the once richest man in the world.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/19/the-myth-of-mer...
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
If his mother was regularly employed as a specialist then the family being high income is a given. Sam posted on Twitter that he received a Macintosh from "my parents" when he was 8 in the early 90s, another sign of high income.
Getting into Stanford and making connections there is certainly plausible, but dropping out and getting funding for Loopt in such short order also raises question marks.