Sam Altman

1. Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.

2. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time.

3. It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter; audacious ideas motivate people.

4. Incentives are superpowers; set them carefully.

5. Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets; this is easy to say but evidently hard to do. You can delete more stuff than you think.

6. Communicate clearly and concisely.

7. Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. Do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.

8. Outcomes are what count; don’t let good process excuse bad results.

9. Spend more time recruiting. Take risks on high-potential people with a fast rate of improvement. Look for evidence of getting stuff done in addition to intelligence.

10. Superstars are even more valuable than they seem, but you have to evaluate people on their net impact on the performance of the organization.

11. Fast iteration can make up for a lot; it’s usually ok to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.

12. Don’t fight the business equivalent of the laws of physics.

13. Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.

14. Scale often has surprising emergent properties.

15. Compounding exponentials are magic. In particular, you really want to build a business that gets a compounding advantage with scale.

16. Get back up and keep going.

17. Working with great people is one of the best parts of life.

Blog

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are...

https://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-wish-someone-had-told-me

He's played chess with Peter Thiel, sparred with Elon Musk and once, supposedly, stopped a plane crash: Inside Sam Altman's world, where truth is stranger than fiction

With the success of ChatGPT, Altman has turned into a household name. And he's just getting started.

https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-worldcoin-helion-future-tech-2023-4

Sam Altman Is TIME's 2023 CEO of the Year

Altman emerged as one of the most powerful executives in the world, the public face of a technological revolution.

https://time.com/6342827/ceo-of-the-year-2023-sam-altman/

interview

How To Build The Future: Sam Altman

It’s fair to say that few people in tech are positioned to have a bigger impact on the future than Sam Altman. As the CEO of OpenAI, Altman and his team have overseen monumental leaps forward in machine learning, generative AI and most recently LLMs that can reason at PhD levels. And this is just the beginning. In his latest essay Altman predicted that ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) is just a few thousand days away. So how did we get to this point? In this episode of our rebooted series "How To Build The Future," YC President and CEO Garry Tan sits down with Altman to talk about the origins of OpenAI, what’s next for the company, and what advice he has for founders navigating this massive platform shift. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Coming up 0:43 Intro: Is this the best time to start a tech company? 6:27 How Sam got into YC 10:53 The early days of YC Research 12:49 Getting the first OpenAI team together 17:13 Why scaling was considered heretical 21:42 Conviction can be powerful 26:15 Commercializing GPT-4 28:53 What drew Sam to create Loopt 30:24 Learning from platform shifts 33:15 Tech incumbents are unaware of what is happening with AI 34:08 Sam's recommended startup path 36:56 Reflecting on the OpenAI drama 39:58 What startups are building with current models 44:16 Outro: Advice for early founders + final thoughts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXCBz_8hM9w