Sam Altman – How to Start a Startup — Transcript

Sam Altman discusses how AI and startup dynamics have evolved over 10 years, highlighting rapid innovation and shifting challenges.

Key Takeaways

AI has drastically accelerated what small teams can achieve in startups.
The startup landscape is shifting so fast that traditional mental models may no longer apply.
Emotional maturity and experience are critical for founders to handle chaos and uncertainty.
Most startups focus on incremental AI applications, but the biggest successes may come from tackling harder, novel problems.
Startups thrive most when the ground is shifting and rapid iteration is possible.

Summary

Sam Altman reflects on the major shifts in startups over the past decade, focusing on AI's transformative impact.
AI enables small teams to move faster and build more competitive products than ever before.
Startups today face a rapidly changing landscape with new tools and scaling laws that require adapting long-term strategies.
The definition of a 'hard startup' is evolving due to advances in AI and automation.
Altman emphasizes the importance of emotional resilience and experience in navigating startup chaos.
He notes the temptation for founders to pursue easy AI applications but encourages tackling ambitious, novel problems.
Tracking founder and model progress over time helps build trust in exponential growth.
The market has not fully adapted to the pace of AI progress, leaving opportunities for bold startups.
Startups have a unique advantage when the environment is shifting rapidly and costs and cycle times are decreasing.
Altman shares insights on incentive alignment, design thinking, and the human aspects of building impactful technology.

Chapters

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Speaker A

Today, I'm sitting down with Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI. A long time ago, you talked or did a talk at Stanford focused on how to start a startup. What is the biggest thing that has kind of shifted over the past, like, 10 years since you initially did those talks?

Speaker A

10 years since you initially did those talks? Clearly AI uh and what is possible to do now with a small team of people has and the speed with which you can do it. Uh and also not only what's possible but

Speaker A

Clearly, AI and what is possible to do now with a small team of people has changed, and the speed with which you can do it. Also, not only what's possible but like what you have to do to be competitive given how much the world has shifted feels totally different.

Speaker A

from 10 years ago, you sort of are in bad shape. If you think of the 10e old startup in your mind today, what is the one that is the best example of a startup that moved extremely quickly?

Speaker A

It is amazing to me what a 10-week-old startup now can look like. And also, if you look at a 10-week-old startup from 10 years ago, you sort of are in bad shape. If you think of the 10-week-old startup in your mind today, what is the one that is the best example of a startup that moved extremely quickly?

Speaker A

where AI has got to be able to use documents presentations spreadsheets whatever. As a first class consumer and uh I don't know, I felt like it would have been a year's worth of work for a startup pretty recently.

Speaker A

I don't even know what they're called, but I met a startup that is like 2 weeks old, something like that, that has an entirely redone sort of office productivity suite, whatever, all made for like a world where AI has got to be able to use documents, presentations, spreadsheets, whatever, as a first-class consumer.

Speaker A

startup is changing so incredibly quickly that I don't think I have a perfect mental model for what over the many years that it takes to build a very successful company. what are going to be the really hard and really valuable

Speaker A

I don't know, I felt like it would have been a year's worth of work for a startup pretty recently.

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of the expectations of you know it's really difficult to make rockets or whatever that may change like quite dramatically I love times like this I think startups are they have the biggest edge when the ground is shifting the

Speaker A

I would assume that if the barriers to starting startups and the tools out there become more proliferated and all this stuff, you would assume that harder startups are easier to start.

Speaker A

seems like a great time to be doing startups. And yet most startups are like, I'm going to go build AI agents for enterprise vertical X. Now, that actually will work in a lot of cases. It'll be very competitive and it

Speaker A

What it means to be a hard startup is changing so incredibly quickly that I don't think I have a perfect mental model for what over the many years that it takes to build a very successful company are going to be the really hard and really valuable things.

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I'm going to go take on the crazy the crazy thing with this completely new set of tools. and also being willing to truly internalize the fact that scaling laws are going to continue and planning for the things that are not possible or

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Like, you know, I've heard a lot of people say, well, anything in the physical world is extra valuable right now because software is going to become free, but, you know, it won't be that long until robots get really good and a lot of the expectations of, you know, it's really difficult to make rockets or whatever, that may change quite dramatically.

Speaker A

incredible temptation to just like go apply today's agents to the easy wins and I get it. One thing that you've said throughout the years is you basically try to whenever you meet someone new, you try to like plot where they are on

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I love times like this. I think startups have the biggest edge when the ground is shifting the most, and when costs are coming down rapidly and cycle times are coming down rapidly.

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Did that sort of thing and like doing this across maybe thousands of people impact your ability to kind of say, okay, the model is this intelligent today, it's this intelligent 3 months later. Suddenly you can like plot this

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That's when startups really, I think, just have a massive inherent advantage. And that's happening in so many places at once right now that it seems like a great time to be doing startups.

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subjectively at least it doesn't feel like watching model progress is the same as like watching a founder develop but I think the underlying belief system about the world is is the same. If I were still advising startup founders, this is

Speaker A

And yet most startups are like, I'm going to go build AI agents for enterprise vertical X. Now, that actually will work in a lot of cases. It'll be very competitive, and it may not be, like, in fact, I'd say it probably won't be the most successful defining startups of that era.

Speaker A

market has still not adapted enough for that. Um I think the market has also still not adapted enough for like the exponential of model progress is going to continue. And it is okay to start working on things now that require

Speaker A

But it will work. But given how much the landscape is in flux, I am surprised there are not more people doing the like, I'm going to go take on the crazy thing with this completely new set of tools.

Speaker A

I think it's just practice. There are a handful of things that I think no matter how much you intellectually understand take a lot of reps to like emotionally be able to handle and operating in a lot of chaos and trusting that

Speaker A

And also being willing to truly internalize the fact that scaling laws are going to continue and planning for the things that are not possible or economical this month but will be possible in 2 years, 4 years, whatever.

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seems to me to be something that you can only learn by going through it. Um, and I actually think this is a real weakness of young founders is that they have not had the career experience of getting to emotional peace with this.

Speaker A

So, it seems like an unbelievable time to be starting startups and there's very fertile ground, but there's also—and I have no judgment if this is what people go for—there's this incredible temptation to just go apply today's agents to the easy wins, and I get it.

Speaker A

You definitely will, if you end up in a high stress sort of impactful job, you will definitely learn how to deal with chaos and function very well through it.

Speaker A

One thing that you've said throughout the years is you basically try to, whenever you meet someone new, you try to plot where they are on your mental model of who they are as a person, and then the next time that you meet them, you basically want to figure out how far or how fast they progressed.

Speaker A

uh, feels like the world's falling apart and then you make it through and then by the 10th time it's not nearly as bad and you're like, well, I survived the first nine, this one's probably not that bad.

Speaker A

Did that sort of thing, and like doing this across maybe thousands of people, impact your ability to kind of say, okay, the model is this intelligent today, it's this intelligent 3 months later? Suddenly you can plot this out and it makes it easy to believe in the growth.

Speaker A

like internalize the enjoyment of experiencing pain or like not great things happening. Uh, how did you make that transition? I was reflecting earlier when you were saying this about how when I would do office hours at YC, I could always tell who the new founders

Speaker A

I think there's a general thing behind both of those, which is I just developed a great trust in exponentials in people or companies or models.

Speaker A

versus a founder that been doing this for a couple of years by their like emotional state when they talked about a problem. Um, I think most people think about the opposite of a bad experience as a good experience and they

Speaker A

I don't think that, subjectively at least, it feels like watching model progress is the same as watching a founder develop, but I think the underlying belief system about the world is the same.

Speaker A

in no experience land. uh then you know you can be grateful for the bad experience too. Naval Ravakant used to say this thing that I loved which is if you had like a fast forward button on a remote for your life your life would be

Speaker A

If I were still advising startup founders, this is the most important thing I would try to get them to wrap their heads around.

Speaker A

grateful for the bad days. When you think about like hard problems and like what rallies people to get excited to go work on hard problems, how do you decide like internally at the company which things to go tackle and when and like

Speaker A

And it is evidently hard for the same reason that there's free money left in the market for betting on high-growth young founders, and it's like one of the markets has still not adapted enough for that.

Speaker A

I think like a clear mission and then a deep understanding of the problem together do a fairly good job of pointing to what you should do. you won't get it all right. You'll still like at some points overly expand or not be ambitious

Speaker A

I think the market has also still not adapted enough for the exponential of model progress to continue.

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out. And in fact, like one of the biggest AI risks I am worried right now is like AI authoritarianism. And you know, a small number of people or companies thinking they need to control the world. That'd be very, very bad. Um,

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And it is okay to start working on things now that require smarter or cheaper models.

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way of that, there's a whole bunch of new constraints like chips and energy and data centers and robots and all the pieces that need to come together to build this platform so that we can like enable this mission. Now there's a bunch

Speaker A

This idea of constantly shifting chaos, how do you get good at it? How do you get good at operating in a chaotic environment?

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really great about producing these units of intelligence and make the world like man this is just you know incredibly capable an incredibly great deal and we're going to imbue it in every product and service and so I think that's very instructive to us

Speaker A

I think it's just practice. There are a handful of things that I think no matter how much you intellectually understand, take a lot of reps to emotionally be able to handle.

Speaker A

intelligence. If ideas are plentiful and there's all this great stuff, we still live like in a physical world and we still want stuff to happen. So, you know, we need to be able to make stuff happen in that world. And I have

Speaker A

Operating in a lot of chaos and trusting that you'll figure it out and it'll be okay, and like this is not going to be the thing that kills you, and you don't quite yet know how you're going to solve it but you're going to figure it out.

Speaker A

at all or is just like the most boring [clears throat] obvious thing which is like to produce anything intelligence included you need to manipulate matter.

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This seems to me to be something that you can only learn by going through it.

Speaker A

What do you think your biggest bottleneck is? Uh if you just say like we want this to continue scaling unabated. What is the biggest bottleneck that you can see?

Speaker A

And I actually think this is a real weakness of young founders, is that they have not had the career experience of getting to emotional peace with this.

Speaker A

good at this. Um, how do you kind of think about not only keeping OpenAI on the OpenAI timelines, but also keep the rest of the world on OpenAI timelines as well?

Speaker A

And so they have a very hard time with it in the early days, and then they eventually learn it, but at, you know, great pain and cost and unforced errors.

Speaker A

You really have to like show them here is the upcoming model. Here's what it enables. Here's our research. like we we we for our core suppliers, we really show them a lot about what we're doing, why we believe what we believe, what

Speaker A

You definitely will, if you end up in a high-stress sort of impactful job, you will definitely learn how to deal with chaos and function very well through it.

Speaker A

with yours as much as you can. Charlie Mer has this awesome line where he's like, "Every time I've thought that I understood the power of incentives, I've like underestimated them." How do you like successfully align all the incentives of the different partners as

Speaker A

At least most people will, but I don't think it's teachable. I think it's only learnable.

Speaker A

happened to come around the same time and for some puzzling reason happened to scale at around the same time. Um, and you know, I would like talk to my friends or my parents or whatever about whether it was like this technology was

Speaker A

You had an interesting thing that you said a long time ago, which is basically like the first time that you experience this company-killing event feels like the world's falling apart, and then you make it through.

Speaker A

And before that was invented and you know you had these like kind of family businesses that ran on trust and you had to know everyone and you didn't have the idea of a corporation. You didn't have the idea of like stockholders really.

Speaker A

And then by the 10th time, it's not nearly as bad, and you're like, well, I survived the first nine, this one's probably not that bad.

Speaker A

let these new entities emerge and not give them the power of a state but give them like much more than the power of a person. And fundamentally this was about you know incentive alignment, liability protection which is another

Speaker A

You also had this other idea where you said at some point, I think it was like a year or two ago, you came to the conclusion that it was always going to be going wrong, and so you kind of had to internalize the enjoyment of experiencing pain or like not great things happening.

Speaker A

to get different companies to sort of specialize in different ways and interact with each other. Serious financial systems and new kinds of instruments.

Speaker A

How did you make that transition?

Speaker A

things we do, but I don't want to diminish what has been this incredible invention and like the the just ridiculous overperformance of capitalism in human society. Like a chart that I think people should look at much more than

Speaker A

I was reflecting earlier when you were saying this about how when I would do office hours at YC, I could always tell who the new founders were because of the way that they reacted to stuff going horribly wrong versus the founder.

Speaker A

like the most zoomed in view of the last hundred years. But if you look back at kind of economic growth, quality of life improvements, uh all of these things and you just like drew out all of human history and you put the line when like

Speaker A

Because I often didn't know how new a company was, but I could tell if it was like a founder in the batch versus a founder that had been doing this for a couple of years by their emotional state when they talked about a problem.

Speaker A

Beyond that, uh I think we have a mission that transcends any amount of economic power anything else could ever do. Uh, and that's probably more important.

Speaker A

I think most people think about the opposite of a bad experience as a good experience, and they would rather have the good experience because it seems like more fun or more pleasant or whatever.

Speaker A

It's like very very high. People talk about this. So I I wonder if capitalism is the first system that allowed these people that are like super kind of self- serving to like their incentives are realigned with societies and just create great products

Speaker A

But if you think about it, the opposite of a bad experience is no experience, and at some point in the not-distant future, you'll be in no experience land.

Speaker A

CEOs, uh, people just like incredibly high opinions of themselves on a way that maybe like would have been just like purely annoying, but now because people can like, you know, buy their shares, maybe you like tolerate their annoyance and antics a little more. So,

Speaker A

Then, you know, you can be grateful for the bad experience too.

Speaker A

What do you think drives those people? I mean, it's different for different ones of them. Like definitely seeing how good they can get at the game or like how much they can get better than themselves every year I

Speaker A

Naval Ravikant used to say this thing that I loved, which is if you had a fast-forward button on a remote for your life, your life would be over.

Speaker A

Um for all of the other problems like you're kind of playing the most interesting strategic game and that can be fun. If you had to think about the way that you operate today versus the way that you would have operated 10

Speaker A

And so the boring parts, the bad parts, it's like much better than no experience.

Speaker A

interesting important thing I can imagine doing and we are now like in the singularity like this is the moment for the la 10 years ago this was like a kind of far off dream at best. Um seemed very improbable and now we're

Speaker A

It's all part of the interestingness of and the kind of emotional depth a

Speaker A

think it's going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world. Um, I'm excited to get to work on that.

Speaker A

I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are like quite terrifying. I'm going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens. Um, but the main thing of what's different than 10 years ago is

Speaker A

like we're actually in it. like this is the real I think it is both true that it is all one crazy exponential and any one moment is not like the tipping point and also that we are somehow in another one

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of those decisive periods where the curve can go one way or another like it was when we started 10 years ago.

Speaker A

What do you think the biggest impacts are on getting this part of the curve right?

Speaker A

I think like there are still major AI alignment issues to solve and safety issues and there are still major economic issues, future of jobs, all of that kind of stuff. But I think the fight of the current moment is

Speaker A

are we going to head to a world of AI authoritarianism or liberty? Are we going to decide that because of the very real safety issues and economic issues that you know we want one single model to be the machine god or the company

Speaker A

associated to do that or are we going to say like you know what it's going to be it may be a little messy but every time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety it's been a long-term net

Speaker A

loss and so we are going to put this in the hands of people we're going to empower power them. We are going to let society express its ideas and use this technology in the way they want. Of course, according to some guard rails

Speaker A

with some guardrails, but you know, with a lot of power and potential. Uh, and I really care that we do it that way.

Speaker A

When you were talking with Patrick Hollson on stage, must have been like a couple months ago, there was this fascinating thing that you said, which is basically like you will talk or text with 3 to 400 people a day internally.

Speaker A

I text more people than anybody else I know. I don't think this is like a good thing. I think this is actually like a bad habit.

Speaker A

Why? Um because it takes up like most of my time and I get like into I have a very short attention span now.

Speaker A

Interesting. What does that enable you to do that like otherwise? Huge amount of context. I mean I'm like a AI model that's not that smart but just has like a huge amount like a shortterm context on like whatever's

Speaker A

happening right now and then forget. Does that enable you to make decisions that other people wouldn't have? Like what company decision better? I don't know. I mean, it lets me make different decisions on other people would.

Speaker A

What different decisions would you have you made in the last like 12 months that you wouldn't have made if you didn't have so much context?

Speaker A

I don't know if I have like a specific one I can share publicly, but there's like a lot of things where, you know, because I I know about some random research breakthrough impending that is going to like affect some customer or

Speaker A

some supplier or whatever, I can make a slightly different decision in the moment. And if I hadn't known it that morning, I would have made a different decision. It would have been worse. One of the things that I think you are the

Speaker A

best at is kind of like long-term thinking and yet it also seems like things are moving so quickly and the world is changing so fast that planning 20 years out and then like looking backwards I don't even know if that

Speaker A

makes sense. Um how do you think about this? How is like is your time pricing shortening? I I actually don't try to plan backwards. I try to have like a a small number of strongly held convictions about the future that are

Speaker A

like directions to head towards but then I try to like plan forwards from the current state about like what can we do now what can we do this year and sometimes you do have to like plan a few

Speaker A

things on a you know 5 or 10 year horizon but I try to plan forward guided to a small number of beliefs about the future I think there are a lot of people who have way too many beliefs about the

Speaker A

future and a kind of rigid worldview that they try to fit and then but what happens is they end up like chasing, you know, you see like space companies turn into AI companies or whatever. Um, and like having just a small number of

Speaker A

things that you deeply believe about the future and being very flexible on the rest. Um, and staying very true to the core is is helpful. One of the people that I know the best, his top, you know, company core value is just critical path

Speaker A

and just focusing on the critical path and like staying focused on the key drivers of whatever the biggest roadblock is. just unfuck that and then go to the next one and do that again.

Speaker A

How do you think about critical path in your own life when you're kind of like trying to make these decisions?

Speaker A

I mean, for so long now, I have felt focused on this singular goal of abundant intelligence and a belief that like incredible human prosperity will come from that as long as we don't have a weird power concentration and kind of

Speaker A

a new kind of authoritarianism. It has been fairly clear to me at any given time what's on the critical path to get there. And I have not been tempted by, you know, should I reconsider the goal or should I think about these other

Speaker A

things. I have been thinking about that a little bit more recently of like, okay, if we really are close to super intelligence, what's next? But but it's this that's kind of how I I subjectively feel we are close is the first time in

Speaker A

like more than a decade I've thought about what is the next thing. And is it the ranch?

Speaker A

Uh I mean eventually there might be a few more things on the way, but that is yes, that is the eventual plan. If you had to like try to guess what else does Sam want to accomplish before he

Speaker A

ranches. Um look AI super intelligence is going to get built like that you know not done but like going to we are we are on the glide path path to the get there is very abundance and decentraliz and like wide

Speaker A

access to it and making sure that it ends up with like broadly shared prosperity. I would really like to accomplish that. So maybe that that's the thing that I've been like thinking about as the next thing like how does

Speaker A

technologically we're going to accomplish our mission. I think a lot of our worldview and a lot of our beliefs about safety and the impact is going to have have also we've gotten those things done too. Um but you know very broadly shared

Speaker A

prosperity and uh a real focus on enabling the world here. Um that seems very important. I've heard you say again and again uh this idea of get on planes in marginal situations. I've done this a huge number of times for you.

Speaker A

Uh so far it's working pretty well. Good. I think I think it's I think it's very solid advice.

Speaker A

When was the last time that you got on a plane in a marginal situation?

Speaker A

Well, I can't say what for, but very recently and it worked out. Congratulations. Thank you.

Speaker A

And I really didn't want to. It was like a very inconvenient two overnights. Didn't want to do it. New baby, whole mess, but I did.

Speaker A

Okay. actually take me into your like mental process for deciding to do this world tour. That is just I mean it again it's like hard to rewind 3 years cuz now like it feels like AI has been here

Speaker A

forever but 3 years ago we had just launched GPT4. The world was melting down. Everybody was freaking out. Um everybody was just like oh man. And no one knew what to think. And I could just feel these like storm clouds brewing and

Speaker A

like people just getting angry or it was like world leaders were like do we need to like take control and shut things down? Like is this thing waking up and about it was it was a weird time and because it had all happened so fast

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people had not had time to like wrap their head around it go through this process whatever. Uh so you know we were like getting all of this escalating stuff and all these like world leaders were like will you come

Speaker A

meet us we're like you know thinking about doing this and that and I was like uh I think if I or someone from the company but at the time company was not very big so I was like probably going to

Speaker A

have to be me does not go like show up and talk to people. I had like a sense it was about to go very badly and I was thinking about doing like a bunch of short trips but I hate long flights. I

Speaker A

hate jet lag. I had the whole thing. So, I was like, I'm just going to like get this over with in a short period of time. Um, Brian Chesky advised me to do it. He had done something for Airbnb,

Speaker A

similar for Airbnb, but he had done like eight cities or something. And you were like, "Fuck it, we ball.

Speaker A

Let's just do 30." 20. I think we did 28 countries, 35 days. Uh, I like lived on an airplane. It was a very strange.

Speaker A

Did you have a bed? I had like a Yeah, I was comfortable, but yeah, I had a bed.

Speaker A

Um, I fly coach, so it's a little bit different. This is better than that, right? This is a lot better than that.

Speaker A

But like, you know, it's like travel still sucks. Like you can make it as comfortable as you want and you still like miss your own bed and your own time zone and your office and whatever.

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One thing that I've learned is no matter how many people have like these cures for jet lag, they're all Like it just sucks. Your brain doesn't like it.

Speaker A

I never in because I went to so many places. I think my biggest time zone change was 4 hours the whole trip and mostly it was like a 1 hour at a time hop. So, I wasn't that jetlagged. I

Speaker A

was just like exhausted and it was very strange. It was kind of cool to get to see the world so quickly because you really do get a sense for like cultural differences that are very subtle when you go from place to place. But by the

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end of it, like the last few days, I started, it was one of these like weird, you know, half asleep, half awake kind of somewhat dreams. But I started having this like vision, feeling, whatever of being in my childhood bed.

Speaker A

Interesting. Which I never had before since. But I would sort of like vaguely wake up and I would think I was in my childhood bed in my childhood room. And I was like, "Okay, this is some like deep it's time

Speaker A

to go home thing." You're like subconscious fighting back or something. Something like that. Interesting. When you're in zombie mode and you're kind of like trying to function, I think uh or goblin mode, whatever you prefer, how do you change?

Speaker A

Like what is different about you? How do you decide to keep on going? I definitely got to this point near the end where I was like hunting down the days till I could be home. Um I was just

Speaker A

like I cuz each day was like it was like you know 14 hours of like nonstop and I'm like not an extroverted person, you you know, I was meeting like hundreds of people a day in some cases. Um, and like

Speaker A

tensions lowered by the end of it, but at the beginning like the world was like very nervous and and then like you know, I think once it just like it did calm down. I I think one thing that helped is it was clear

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that like I knew when I was going to get home and I knew I was going to have to do it again for a while. Um, I've done smaller ones since. I probably do like something like that once or twice a

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year. But I was going to say like a thing I learned is that I would much rather put a bunch of international travel together in like a 7 or 10 day chunk than a bunch of one day trips spread out. So I always

Speaker A

do try to do it that way. Now I think a lot of people overestimate the like risk involved in making most actions. Like there is a lot of risk if you're just, you know, buying a bunch of call options

Speaker A

on Robin Hood, but there's probably a lot less risk on getting on planes and stuff. What have been the best examples of times where you basically did something that seemed really risky to other people, but you knew wasn't or you

Speaker A

believed wasn't? I guess the obvious example would be like I I was always extremely high conviction buying a lot of comput.

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Have you ever seen the meme everything's high risk if you're a No. Good meme. Um, I spend a lot of time trying to talk to people about why they think a specific decision is high risk or low risk. And I have found that just

Speaker A

getting people to speak about it out loud will often at least get through their intellectual blocks in either direction because people are usually wrong one way or the other. Not always the emotional part of it, but sometimes also. If you had to think through one of

Speaker A

these meetings where someone is like firmly against some decision that you want to do, what is the most effective way to kind of help them see what you see?

Speaker A

I don't think I'm very good at this to be honest. I think like the right answer is to spend a lot of time really trying to explain it and get people there. And I actually think I used to be better at

Speaker A

that. And as life has gotten so busy, I'm more just like I get upset or frustrated or say, "This is what we're going to do." And I don't I don't think it's like a positive trait. And I would

Speaker A

like to get back to more of the like let's really talk it through. You said that you used to be much harder to work with, I don't know, 2008 910 somewhere around there than you are today.

Speaker A

I I don't know if people would describe me as fun to work with. I like interesting to work with, like effective, ambition raising, like very mission focused, but like dayto-day like really fun to work with. I don't think

Speaker A

I'm like a particularly fun person in general. I feel like if you are having a good time, it's tends to be infectious. And I think if you are generally working on things that you want to work on, it is

Speaker A

having a good time. Uh maybe I'm wrong. I mean, you could go ask a bunch of people I work with. I'm not I'm not I I don't I don't think you would get like a resounding fun to work with.

Speaker A

Maybe not that language. I think people would say stuff like creative solutions to problems, new insights, like very high level of ambition, like got me to do something I didn't think I could do, that kind of thing.

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What does it typically look like when you go into a meeting with someone and you realize that they are not ambitious enough and you need to try to help them become more ambitious?

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the the the version of this that came to mind when you were saying that was like first office hours I would have with new YC founders and you take average person who's worked in corporate America you know at a big tech

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company for a few years and the level of ambition scaled thinking self-belief whatever it's just catastrophically low horrible horrible and you realize that like this person has never not had a boss in their life. They have never not had a

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parent or a teacher or a manager or whatever that kind of would tell them what to do or what they were allowed to do or whatever. And they also kind of got punished for being too creative or wanting too much or thinking too big or

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too ambitious, whatever. the most countries or cultures have some sort of phrase for being too ambitious.

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Basically, tall poppy syndrome. That's one. Um, and you realize like how deep this is in people and that they like heard it and their parents said it to them, their teachers said them, and friends said to them, whatever, from

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when they were like quite little. and getting people to just like not think that way takes some real time.

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What's the most effective path to get someone from not believing in themselves to believing in themselves?

Speaker A

I think small repeated wins. Like you do something you didn't think you could do or you kind of try something that felt, you know, too ambitious or too high expectation and it works and you're say, "Okay, try it again." Do you do anything

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like Steve Jobs where he would like if someone was worried he would like stare into their eyes and get No, nothing like that.

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I don't think so. It's like you can do it. I I I don't I don't I'm not like an in I don't do inspirational speeches. I don't I don't do like the hards none of that.

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What's your favorite strategy game? I have not played a game other than like my poker night with friends in so long.

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Uh I wish I had. I guess I'll have to say poker, but I uh I miss like great board games. What was your favorite board game?

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There's like no one board game where I be like, I want to play that like again and again. I don't have like like I'm not like someone who's like Katana is the best board game of all time or

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whatever. But they're all fun and they're fun cuz they're like new and you have to like figure out a new set of challenges and rules and everything else. When you're thinking about the business world, I think you build your

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company differently than almost anyone else is able to build companies, is willing to build companies. What allows you to do that? I actually think every big company is pretty different. I don't think this is a unique thing. I think

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just like if if you make a list of the 20 biggest tech companies or whatever, they're all like shockingly different from each other in terms of their strategy and how they operate and their culture.

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I think we are quite different than everybody else, but that's not a deep insight. What do you think your like superpower is?

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I think we did a really good job of a principled conviction on something that no one else believed even though it was the obvious thing one should believe and then putting together all of the pieces and the talent around that to sort of

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make it happen. What allowed you to kind of have that conviction that where other people just didn't?

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Um, I have thought about this a lot. I do not know. It seemed so clearly obvious to all of us that I was more worried that we were drinking our own Kool-Aid than everybody else was wrong.

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But with the benefit of hindsight, we were clearly right. And I don't understand the like deep mental block and lack of conviction from everybody else. It's very strange. I I have I have spent a lot of time trying to

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understand this. Did you find any explanation in your you know man's search for why or no?

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Um I mean there's all the obvious stuff about like group think and like the big transformations just come don't come along that often and exponential curves don't stay powerful for so long for so often. But like you know maybe between

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2016 and 2018 we had to get really lucky and it required like a lot of great belief but then by 2019 certainly by 2020 we shouldn't have really gotten to exist.

Speaker A

Google should have just run away with it. Yeah. I think Jeff Bezos called it like a business miracle that they built AWS and then didn't have any serious competition for like seven years. And I feel like OpenAI is like another

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business miracle. There's clearly something here about why big companies get sclerotic and set in their ways and it helps them in a lot of ways too. U but this is like I mean this is wonderful. I think it's great that the

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big companies don't stay the only dominant forces forever. That'd be really bad. Um but there's clearly something where these business miracles happen and they shouldn't.

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Is that right or should they? Well, I think it's great for the world that they do, right? But to go back and explain in 2019 why OpenAI was like allowed by the giants with huge amounts of capital and

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talent and everything else to do what we've done. It's like hard to explain. Why did Microsoft give you the money?

Speaker A

Um that I think is easier to explain which is Google had Deep Mind and Microsoft did not have an AI bet and you know big companies feel like they should have something in play in all of the major

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areas of technology. Was it kind of like they think it's going to be big but then underestimated how big it would be?

Speaker A

I think it's been like great for them. I don't know if we've added1 trillion$2 trillion dollars or whatever of market cap to Microsoft but I think it's been a lot. Um and I think they have gotten incredible technology and cloud growth

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and will continue to. So yeah, I'm sure it's bigger than they thought it was going to be, but I think they made a good bet and have done super well with it and very happy about that.

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There's been different versions of OpenAI. The first one was the research lab. Next one was the product company and you kind of said that like you bolted on the product company onto the research lab which is the exact opposite

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of what most companies do and now you're basically going to be like a massive infrastructure company and like almost all the value from open is just going to come from this like low margin infrastructure. And then you also said

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that basically in order to transition into the next phase of this business it's not necessarily something the way that your brain works is naturally like designed to operate in that kind of model. What do you have to change and

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like what is that next phase of the business? I don't answer this because I don't like I think this is now a getting into like a like a direct something we're not quite ready to talk about but uh I am very excited for the

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next phase and I think I have figured out how to align something that I am very good at and very passionate about with what will be the next like 10 or 100x of our growth. So how did the transition of Sam the

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research lab head to Sam the product company head like what was that what were the biggest transitions for you on that? I mean the whole thing was just extremely different. Like it has felt like two almost completely unrelated

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jobs. And it's not quite to say like I did one and now I do the other cuz I also still am responsible for the research lab. Um but they are almost separate things and definitely running the research lab did not prepare me for

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running the product company in really any way. Did the YC experience prepare you more? Um like I had watched a lot of people have to scale big companies.

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Was it fun to kind of like finally get in the driver's seat? No. Um I the fifth day after Chad GBT launched was the day we crossed a million users and I had like watched it go up the first

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day and then come down in the afternoon and then go up the second day to a higher peak and then come down, go up the third day to a higher peak and then come down. And each of these days the

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researchers were like, "Oh, that was some crazy flash in the pan PR thing. This is like over and you know that's not going to happen." And I had seen enough at YC that I knew that when something was growing like that

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completely organically, it this had all of the spectral signature to me of something that is like was going to happen. And then on the fifth day, it crossed a million users and I came home and that was when it

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really hit me that like we were about to become a company and it was going to go very fast and it was going to be a crazy like a like we were just going to turn into like a big company real quick. And

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I had watched what these founders went through and I came home and Ollie was like, "Oh, I saw that you crossed a million years.

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Congratulations." I was like, "You have no idea how bad this is. You have no idea what's about to happen. It's not just bad for me, it's bad for you, too.

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Like we have this nice quiet life, you know, it's really wonderful. It's about to like kind of go through a cannon. And that is what happened. But it was like a very abrupt transition. I knew it was going to come and I had watched other

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people go through it and I knew that it was like not a pleasant experience, but I was like, well, we're being shot at the cannon. Here we go. Were you like subconsciously just like preparing yourself for years if you know that this

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is eventually going to happen and the intelligence is going to get good enough where like there will be a magical product?

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My take on it is that I intellectually knew it was going to happen at some point. I had no idea when. And I didn't know that was going to be the moment, of course, um but that I had decided to

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pretend to myself and I had successfully deluded myself into a sort of acting like it wasn't going to happen. Um truly running the research lab was the coolest, most fun, most amazing job and lifestyle setup I could possibly have

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imagined. How so? I mean, you were like it not stressful at all. Uh, it was intellectually incredibly satisfying. It was the smartest group of people with probably the most important work that has happened in like the last century, maybe

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longer, I don't know. And I had this like front row seat. And like that was a once- in many generations moment. It was unbelievable. It was the coolest thing.

Speaker A

Are you guys experiencing that same kind of growth? You know, I keep on seeing Tibo post on Twitter that basically here's another reset, here's another reset. Are you seeing that same like chat GBTesque experience again?

Speaker A

Totally. Um I think there have been two giant form factors and associated growth so far.

Speaker A

There was the sort of chat bots and then the coding agents and the coding agents are just going totally nuts. There will be a third one soon, I think, which will be this idea of the sort of persistent agents, chiefs of

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staff co-workers colleagues whatever we call them. And that'll and, you know, I think that'll come pretty soon. So, we're going to go through like the third of these waves pretty fast.

Speaker A

So, a long time ago, apparently in August last year, I saw you tweet something and I thought to myself, this is not going to help the reputation. Um, let's see.

Speaker A

Why? [laughter] Why did you do that? Um, well, first of all, I love that scene from the movie. Like the Death Star is coming out of hyperspace and there's this dramatic music and it's like a great it's like a great scene. Um, I

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thought it was a funny like I was it was like, you know, I was scrolling Twitter.

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I think it was late at night. I don't really remember. This is where the conspiracy theories happen. Like that you're you're like you're feeding the fire here.

Speaker A

I just thought it was it amused me at the time. There was like it was I don't know. It was not a great tweet to be honest to be clear.

Speaker A

Uh I actually thought it was great. I thought it was funny. I thought it was funny. I think [laughter] I thought it was funny.

Speaker A

Yeah. Um I do feel like this is more and more what the world feels like. Uh [gasps] yes.

Speaker A

Uh yes. Okay. Yes. That's a good That's a good meme. The way that somebody explained kind of the marketing challenge for OpenAI and the industry in general is number one, we are close to creating what we need to explain to the world.

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Number one, we are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish. Number two, we are going to make sure that our first wishes broadly benefit humanity and that we kind of get the world to a place where a lot more people get to

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have a lot more wishes wishes. And number three, the space of what you can wish for is incredibly big and creative and it'll be quite exciting to like figure that out with real sort of human values and preferences. But but I think

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there's a fourth thing too which is exactly that. You start making these wishes, the computer grants them, and then you're like, I didn't think that was going to work.

Speaker A

Yeah. What now? It's a weird feeling. Yeah. It's just like the problem where I guess, you know, people spent like a hundred years trying to disprove some what was it? Jacobian. Yeah. This thing.

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And then some guy just asked Claude and it was like I don't know within a few days or something like this. So, I'm I'm I'm I think there's going to be lots of great jobs in the future. I really do. I

Speaker A

think we're going to have lots of intellectual fulfillment. And I think most jobs are going to adapt more than it seems like they should. But math, I think, is a very important example of something for us to study very closely right now of

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something that may not go that way. In fact, I would say probably won't go that way. It seems like even as the systems get better and better, the people that I know that like no one is less busy.

Speaker A

Everyone is more busy. Everyone's just doing more stuff except for the people that are like, "Oh, I spent a trillion tokens." Uh, and like what have I love this uh thing that I saw where someone said like, "I spent, you know, ungodly

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numbers of tokens." And then someone said, "Why aren't you more successful?" You know, technology for a long time has been promising people that they're going to work less and they're going to have all this leisure. And it has gone in that direction. Like I

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think people do have more time for leisure than they had at many previous points in history and a higher quality of life in many ways.

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But somehow we never get the promise of the 4-hour work week at mass scale in society. And I don't expect AI to change that. Uh clearly society is not working for a lot of people and more productivity gains that actually

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occur to people would be a great thing and I suspect they will. I suspect that will happen. But a thing that I really admire about people is our expectations go up. We always want more. We think of new things to do to

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create for each other to want for ourselves and we, you know, it's like a it's like a relative game. People are like very focused on how they're doing relative to other people. And so the competition that drives the economy and

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the kind of I think the the the very wonderful desires about wanting to be useful to other people and create something and be of service and that whole cluster. I expect that to keep going and I think we're all going to be

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much busier than we thought we were supposed to be in a post super intelligence world and we're still going to complain about it but secretly we're going to be happy.

Speaker A

How do you think the status games change as less and less of our direct input is correlated with like value creation?

Speaker A

I don't I don't think it will feel at all like our direct like the things that we value. I suspect will be things that are like very human.

Speaker A

Well, like one thing is like cooking for people. You're not like creating a bunch of value in the world, but it like shows love.

Speaker A

You are creating value in that it's like those are the experiences that you're not creating like economic value in the maybe traditional sense. Um, cooking for people is a great example.

Speaker A

I suspect that people cooking and eating together will remain important long after robots can do a great job cooking food. Do you think that a good heristic would almost be like the greatest works of the the the longest

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surviving works? So let's say the Bible for example, odds are it's still going to be impactful like a thousand years from now because it's been impactful for the past 2,000 years so far. Do you think that if you had to like

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extrapolate out what are the things that humans are still going to care about, it's like what is the most primal earliest thing? You know, we love adventure, we love a good quest, cooking. Betting against evolutionary biology is like usually a bad bet.

Speaker A

Yeah. And so I would I would assume those things continue. When was the last time that you realized that you weren't like being ambitious enough?

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I mean, I definitely badly undersshot on the compute investments. Could you have known going in with the right mental model?

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Yes, but I got like psyched out by the financial markets or something. I don't know.

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That was clearly a mistake. How do you correct that in the future? Uh well, I mean hopefully I'll learn from it and I I'll make some new mistakes, but I won't make that one again.

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On the compute side, this is kind of like the biggest infrastructure project of maybe all time or is about to be.

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Yeah. Are you going to try and like vertically integrate under OpenI's hood everything from like power generation to like token generation to you know serving some person in chap or codeex or something like that or are you going to

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try and have a bunch of partners? We're not literally going to try to do it all inside of OpenAI obviously but we will try to do a better job of a well functioning supply chain than we have done so far. like you know we we have

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brought chip design and model design together and that's been good. I don't think we need to bring like electron production together in the same way because that's more of a commodity. Uh however I am when you really think about

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the whole supply chain that has to come together to produce intelligence. I would say there is relatively too much focus on algorithms that create better algorithms and not enough focus on data centers that can create more data centers, which in a world of robots

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and a truly automated supply chain, you can totally imagine doing. You can like spend a data center's thinking power to drive a fleet of robots to make more copies of the data center. And that's probably a very wonderful thing to do.

Speaker A

uh relative to other uses of that compute if we're right about what that additional compute will eventually unlock. How much of your time is spent thinking about how to like successfully design that fully robot into end future where intelligence can just produce more

Speaker A

intelligence spent thinking about almost all goes into like execution like the idea that's a very obvious idea it's very easy you can like kind of relatively quickly say here's the pieces that need to come together but then to like get that whole

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machinery and all those companies working together um that that you know none of the glory of the big idea and trying to like think the big thoughts but like a lot of grinding when you think of like execution ution.

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What does that typically mean for you? Not there's no typical there like the I mean to the degree that there is it's that you just like do whatever step is required in the problem and figure out how to make it happen. Mhm.

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But you know, figuring out how to like finance new fab build out is very different than figuring out how to get a great chip design team together and then get them to work with the research team and then actually get the supply chain

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running. Well, like each of those is like a very different approach. One thing that I know that Brian Chesky does uh is he talks about like shamelessly trying to find whoever the expert is and any given thing and then basically just

Speaker A

go ask them whatever question he has. as if he's like trying to come come up to speed on something. What is your process for doing something like that if it's something new that you need to become good at in a very rapid period of time?

Speaker A

Definitely finding the experts and talking to them, reading as much as I can. Uh I don't have a lot of like great str I don't have a lot of like novel strategies here. I I've always been really grateful and pleasantly surprised by how

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much experts are willing to help people if they ask. Uh, it's like a very nice thing about humanity.

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One thing I've heard you say is you should always ask for what you want.

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Um, because not all the time you get it, but sometimes you do. Sometimes you do.

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And when you do, amazing things can happen. When was the last time that you asked for something that would seem absolutely insane to someone else and you got it?

Speaker A

Actually, it was this recent time I got on a plane that I still can't talk about, but it Okay, go back one more. Go back one more that you can talk about.

Speaker A

[laughter] I mean in some sense codeex was an example of this like this is not the most recent one but it was one that I think it's instructive. Um, we were way behind cloud code and it seemed like a kind of crazy kamicazi

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mission to try to beat them with a coding app. And you know the like the consensus is that this kind of thing never works and you just move on to the next one. But you know it's like a

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fool's errand to try to like win when someone else already has momentum in a particular product category. But we decided we thought it was really important. We asked a team to do it.

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They performed a legitimate like unbelievable very rare in the history of business thing and now it is the product that most of end model that most of the best coders that I know use. Um and that felt like an impossible thing but if we

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hadn't asked the team like hey we have a really important but extremely hard mission for you just wouldn't have happened.

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Why did you make that decision? Why didn't you just give up? bec felt like one of these few very strategic areas that was going to happen very quickly and coding is so important to RSI to say nothing of the economic value that we

Speaker A

just didn't it didn't feel like one we could give up on YC you basically had the mo most distilled version of what the mission was is just trying to increase the amount of innovation in the world my hunch is that if you actually

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like thought uh why did you decide to go work on OpenAI instead of YC? You could almost make the argument that you could just have a bigger impact on increasing the amount of innovation in the world through working on

Speaker A

it wasn't that intellectualized at the time. It was just like I kind of knew that I mean my whole life I wanted to work on AI and I kind of knew that it would be the most important thing I could ever touch.

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Like for me it was like my passion. I just and I did think it'd be really important, but I just wanted to do it.

Speaker A

What were those first few weeks like? I know that there was this I I don't know if you describe it as a camp, but people just basically like all got together on some kind of retreat and it wasn't even

Speaker A

like meant to be a company at the time. I think it was just like like the first few weeks once we started. No, we were we were in Greg Brockman's apartment.

Speaker A

Yes. Um and there were maybe like 10 of us, 12 of us. And you know, it had been all of this work to get it going and then we showed up one day.

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Mhm. The first day I was like, you know, January 4th, something like that. And it was like, so here we are.

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What are we going to do? We should get a whiteboard. We should start talking about ideas. Maybe we should write papers. And I had this like, oh what have we done? Like it was like a really crazy moment. Um,

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had you already like committed to the world and a whole bunch of other people like were doing it? It took it took a couple of years to like really get our groove and figure out what we're going to do. It just it was not I mean we knew

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that we wanted to like figure out how to build AI, but beyond that, man, really unclear.

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When you're in the like stumbling through the woods phase of this type of, you know, Manhattan project, how do you most efficiently just stumble through the trees to rapidly figure out what not to work on? I mean, if something's not

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working and you run out of ideas, you can kill it. That's kind of easier. The really hard thing is when something is working super well, when do you decide to kill the other things to make it work even

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better? So, there have been a lot of quite important moments in OpenAI history where one thing started to really work and we killed other good things to make the best thing work better.

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So when GPT3 started to work, we shut down things like robotics stuff that we're really excited about to really focus on this. And then when coding agents started to work recently, we shut down things like Sora that we were also

Speaker A

really excited about and the browser to really work on this. And that is difficult to do. Um let's say you invest a billion dollars into some new business like Sora. How do you decide whether or not that business is going to like

Speaker A

become a you know OpenAI pillar? Oh, no. It would have been super successful. It was just like it was more important to put the compute and the energy into coding agents.

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Take me into one of those meetings like imagine you're in that meeting. I guess maybe you were in that meeting where you were saying we've spent a year plus on this thing, huge amounts of money, huge amounts of compute, lots of people and

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resources, a lot of momentum into it, people use it, they love it, and then you decide we're going to pull the plug.

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Like how do you make that call? Yeah. It's not like a it's it's not a one meeting thing. It's like a I think it's a real it's like a somewhat gradual realization that there is a more important use of this compute

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these people um you know this product direction and we're going to make a very painful decision to get there.

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How do you realign people once you do have to like kind of kill their baby to move them to another baby?

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People kind of understand the mission and the stakes and the need to reorient to get there. So even if they're like unhappy in the moment, sometimes they're very happy, sometimes they're like, "Yeah, this is the right thing for the mission." But even if

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they're unhappy in the moment, they're like, "I get why we're doing this." And the kind of continuing refocus towards super intelligence is like a good thing.

Speaker A

Do you think that there's going to be projects currently that are going to get killed?

Speaker A

I assume harder to pursue. Yeah. There's this amazing line from John Collison where he said basically everything in the world if you just look around it's like so difficult to make things happen even like getting park bench built it's incredibly difficult

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and so when you look around you can kind of think of the world as like a universe of passion projects and I think that if you are in like Steve Jobes's position where you're going to like create something where a

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billion people might interact with it every single day for are like ours. You have to like think deeply about how do I like design something that people are going to love and ideally not be unhappy about. How do you think about design?

Speaker A

I feel super lucky to get to work with Johnny IV on designing beautiful things.

Speaker A

Mhm. And I have learned so much from him about how he really studies a problem before trying to get to the solution and not not even letting him think too much about the solution until he really designs really understands the problem.

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And I think this is a key that I didn't appreciate before. Like really great design is way more about understanding the problem than the flash of insight.

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And if you try to rush towards the thing or lock yourself too much into the thing, um, you will not do as good of a job. I think the iPhone is the greatest piece of technology humanity has collectively yet made. It is an

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incredible thing, but I don't like love my relationship with it anymore. I turned off my notifications, so I actually like it much better now.

Speaker A

Yeah, I keep myself on do not disturb. That wasn't even enough. I just like I turned off notifications for everything except a very small number of things.

Speaker A

Um, and I never have them on because I just, you know, I can like look at if I want to look at it.

Speaker A

Even messages apps. Even messages apps. That was like a big life upgrade. And I deleted Tik Tok because it was just like too powerful.

Speaker A

Uh, you were addicted to Tik Tok. You know, I uh, so here's a crazy thing that happened. When we were building the Sora app, I made myself get addicted to Tik Tok cuz I wanted to just like learn.

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I was like, you know, I I had never really used it before. I mean, I like people would send me a Tik Tok or whatever, but I never got sucked into it. And I was like, I really don't want

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to build something that is going to have that kind of thing, absorb people's time, but not and I loved it. I love Tik Tok. I really thought it was great. Um, and then I thought I could like control

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it. I was like, "Oh, you know, it's actually kind of fun, but I only use it for like 10 minutes to wind down before bed and I'm like totally in control of it." And then it was like an hour one

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night and then some Saturday afternoon I was on the couch for like 3 hours and I was like this is like really not what I thought the iPhone was supposed to be about. Now I'm really enjoying in the

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moment like a drug but I can tell it's bad for me. And then I like briefly got it back under control and I was down to like 5 10 minutes a night whatever you know like a little wind down before bed.

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Then I was just like enough. I think the iPhone is amazing and yet I did not feel like I had enough self-control to keep that app or I did not feel like the notifications on messaging apps were like a net good thing for me. And I'm

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sure we will make an incredible, beautiful, like really helpful, empowering set of devices. And I'm also sure that people will misuse them and it'll make people's lives worse in ways we can't imagine. And we'll adapt. But this is a thing about powerful

Speaker A

technology. you're inventing a new device, what is that process of exploration through the problem space?

Speaker A

Like if you're Johnny, I don't answer on his behalf. Um, but he's like talked about this before somewhat, but it's like his process. You know, when he's doing the car, he will like go study all the history of

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motorsport and then like the different type faces that people use for the text in the cabin of a car and the materials and why and like the different sounds that engines have made over time and why some have appealed. I mean, he'll write

Speaker A

literal books of all of his explorations of all of these like unbelievably detailed small components.

Speaker A

Did you guys basically take those books and like try to like use them as training data to make like a Johnny model?

Speaker A

Um, no. But that would be a great thing to try there. Yeah, there is definitely a part of his process that I don't understand. Like I understand the studying, I understand the refinement of a very new concept into something great. But

Speaker A

there is like a middle step, the inspiration that comes from understanding the problem really well to the like very novel idea kind of that seems to me to happen all at once and I don't understand that.

Speaker A

When you're thinking about designing something, how what goes through your mind? I'm not a designer in any way. I would I would not I I uh I try to be like pretty good about realizing what I'm not good

Speaker A

at and I wouldn't try to have a strong opinion there. What are you the worst at on the business building side?

Speaker A

Maybe product. Really? Maybe. Okay. How do you find great product people if you're bad at product?

Speaker A

This is a thing that I've never quite agreed with people on. There's there's like a there's like a business meme that you can only hire people in things that you deeply understand. I think it know if they're great. I think this is just

Speaker A

clearly not true. I don't understand design either. I know Johnny's great design. Like there's lots of things I can point to when you talk to him for 30 minutes. It's very obvious.

Speaker A

Which things do you try to actively get better at and then which things do you just try to outsource and understand that you're just never going to be one of the best?

Speaker A

I I am a big believer in you should try to get better at your strengths and the whole like obsession with I'm going to get better at the things that I'm just not good at at all and never going to be

Speaker A

good at huge trap. Super good at your strengths. Okay. What are your biggest strengths if you had to like force rank?

Speaker A

I I hate this question. Um I don't hate this from a false modesty perspective. I think it's like very hard to say anything insightful about your own strengths.

Speaker A

You're clearly good at really rallying people around some objective. Sure. Uh but I don't like I don't think I could teach someone who isn't good at that how to be good at that. I think the things that come supernaturally to

Speaker A

someone are very hard to I don't know. or at least in my own case, I don't like deeply understand why I'm good at that or what to do about it. Although I think we talked about earlier like this

Speaker A

category of things that you can learn but you can't teach. Mhm. Um I think this is quite important to understand and like if you want to get good at something like that, asking someone to explain it to you in my

Speaker A

experience never works. Really studying them and like sitting with them in meetings and just trying to observe it and learn it yourself that does work.

Speaker A

Um, but [clears throat] and like when there has been something that I do want to get better at, I have tried to just be around someone who's great at it and really deeply study it. But I don't think they would have been able to

Speaker A

explain it to me. I don't think they could have like taught it to me by talking to me about it. I think that's totally right. If you look at like the way that the best people in the world

Speaker A

learn video games, if you're playing like CS GO, you like play some CS GO, so you have like the basic game dynamics and then you just go watch a pro and like see how they interact on the map at

Speaker A

different points in the game and stuff. When you think about like organization pace, you know, there's like ambition, all these other things, but like you ideally over time want your organization, you obviously don't want it to slow down, but ideally it even

Speaker A

moves faster. How do you like bake that in? I think it's like 90% the people you put in leadership roles. Okay. There's like other things you can do. People have all these different sort of operating rhythms and how they try to

Speaker A

run the company and this management technique and that one. And I think it's I think mostly just comes down to the people. Definitely something I think about with everybody in a role like that is like are they a fast mover or a slow

Speaker A

mover? How do you measure that without actually having worked with them in the past?

Speaker A

Well, ideally you have worked them in the past. I I think most of the time executives at a company should be promoted internally, not hired externally.

Speaker A

Okay. Um but it when you do need to hire someone externally, you spend a lot of time talking to them, spend a lot of time reference checking, you try to like work together in some kind of casual way.

Speaker A

slightly different note. What was the most painful thing that happened in the last 12 months?

Speaker A

Honestly, having kids and working really hard at the same time is brutal. It's just extremely painful. Like you like know you're I I and I think I'm like a very present dad relative. Like I don't do anything but

Speaker A

work and hang out with my family really at this point, but I still feel like I'm missing so much of this like one-time thing. It's very painful. When you think of someone like Masa for example, what about like his brain and the way that he

Speaker A

sees the world is so different? I think he will end up being like one of the wild successes of this decade.

Speaker A

Um, incredible person. Dear friend, incredible person, massive conviction and belief and not afraid at all of big numbers and scale and it's great. Uh there are not many Masa like people in the world and we should be very grateful for them.

Speaker A

What made him like what what I I don't know if you've like talked with him but uh I mean as far as I can tell he was like always like this.

Speaker A

Do you also have the same sort of just like no con like no ceiling concept of scale?

Speaker A

Not I I think Masa is like a N of one character. Do you kind of view open AI as a little bit like the golden goose?

Speaker A

In what way? um spawning a bunch of very valuable things over time and just building like a core competency of increasing intelligence in the world.

Speaker A

Not really how I think of it. I get I get what you're saying, but it it doesn't feel like we're just like spitting out golden eggs. It feels like we're building this kind of compounding thing.

Speaker A

I think one of the my favorite mental models that I've taken from you is this idea of real trends versus fake trends.

Speaker A

And oh yeah, this is a this is an important thing. Like whenever people talked about bubbles or anything else, I was always kind of confused. Like I'm, you know, I studied Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger a bunch and so they love to talk about

Speaker A

bubbles and things being overvalued. I was trying to like decipher how do you figure out whether or not something is real or fake and whether or not it's going to persist and continue or it's just going to, you know, revert to the

Speaker A

mean. And what did you figure out? Well, it was I think your mental model of basically if there's a small group of people like what is a real trend versus a fake trend? A fake trend is, you know,

Speaker A

the VR situation where someone there's a lot of hype, but then someone buys the thing, they don't really love it. They don't really start to like design their life around the experience of using it and then it sits on the shelf.

Speaker A

Whereas like for me with Chadbt, it's pretty much every day and maybe for like sometimes I need to work a lot so I spend like 3 hours or some days it's like almost nothing but it's like there persistent in my life. How do you kind

Speaker A

of like figure out now whether or not something is a real trend or a fake trend inside of the company and just generally same principle like is there a real deep enduring how did you come to that philosophy or

Speaker A

mental framework? Well, I like kind of watched a lot of startups. Uh the the there are many amazing things about working at YC but just the amount of data you get and as long as you're willing to like spend the

Speaker A

time trying to analyze it and make sense of it, you can really figure out a lot of things. Are there any big mental frameworks that you used to have that you think are wrong in today's environment and will be continue to get

Speaker A

more wrong over time as like intelligence explodes? I mean, I kind of think a huge amount of them are they weren't necessarily wrong at the time, although I'm sure I was wrong about a bunch of things, too, but a huge

Speaker A

amount of them are wrong now. Um, I think a startup of today still looks mostly like a startup of 10 years ago because that's what the received wisdom says you're supposed to do. And sure, it's different in some

Speaker A

ways. People are like, well, I'm going to hire less people and spend more money on tokens for Codeex or whatever. But it should probably look very different. And I have met a few people who are trying to do a startup in a completely

Speaker A

different way. But most people just use it means like use more codecs and uh that doesn't seem like enough.

Topics:Sam AltmanOpenAIstartupsAI innovationfounder advicestartup challengesscaling lawsemotional resiliencetechnology trendsstartup ecosystem

What is the biggest change in startups over the past 10 years according to Sam Altman?

The biggest change is the rise of AI, which enables small teams to build competitive products much faster and shifts what is required to be successful.

Why does Sam Altman believe startups have an advantage when the ground is shifting?

Because rapid changes lower costs and cycle times, allowing startups to iterate quickly and capitalize on new opportunities before larger companies can adapt.

What does Sam Altman say about emotional resilience for startup founders?

He highlights that emotional maturity and experience are crucial for handling the chaos and uncertainty inherent in startups, which young founders often lack initially.

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