Y COMBINATOR · EXTRACTED

The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware ft. Sam Altman

Sam Altman on the moment OpenAI almost didn't get started, the product overhang in front of every founder right now, and why this is the best time in history to build a company.

▶478K views on YouTubePreview, 1 of 6 tactics free

With Sam Altman

"This is the best fucking time ever in the history of technology, ever, period, to start a company." — Sam Altman
Sam Altman, on the episode

Sam Altman ran Y Combinator before he ran OpenAI. He returned to YC for this conversation as the leader of the company that triggered the AI inflection point. The talk is less a vision speech and more a behind-the-scenes look at the operating decisions: how OpenAI almost didn't get founded, how he thinks about defensibility now that everyone is competing in his space, what he actually looks for in a hire, the rumored Jony Ive partnership, and why he believes the gap between what models can do and what products are doing with them has never been wider. Refreshingly low on hype, high on specifics.

Tactic 01

Sam Altman, Y Combinator

Lean into the decisions everyone else is talking out of

The play

Find the ambitious decision everyone avoids. Gather the key people and decide now.

Sam Altman says

OpenAI almost didn't start and the decision felt coin-flippy at the time, since AGI sounded crazy and DeepMind seemed impossibly far ahead. There was a year in 2015 of talking about whether to start it, while there was other great startup stuff that would clearly work. This is the story of many ambitious things, where the reasons not to do them are so strong that it takes a core of people sitting in a room and deciding to do it. These are important moments and when in doubt you should lean into them.

Try this

Identify your most deferred ambitious decision. Get the key people in a room this week and decide.

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Tactic 02

Pick a one-of-one mission to concentrate talent

Sam Altman says

Saying you're going to do a crazy, exciting, important thing that other people aren't doing lets you get a lot…

Episode quotes and Try this

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Tactic 03

Build into the product overhang

Tactic 04

Hire for slope, not y-intercept

Tactic 05

Build defensibility after you have something worth defending

Tactic 06

The startups win the clock-cycle changes

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