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Sam Altman - CEO at OpenAI

Samuel Harris Altman (/ˈɔːltmən/ AWLT-mən; born 1985) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and reformed programmer. He was the Co-Founder of Loopt and is the current (and former) CEO of OpenAI. In the past he was also the President of Y Combinator and was the CEO of Reddit, if only for an instant.

You might think the most interesting thing about Sam Altman are his successes throughout his career, ranging from running YC, (semi) successfully exiting Loopt or more than likely something to do with OpenAI. But in my eyes — you’d be wrong.

The most interesting thing about Sam Altman was that Paul Graham saw it all coming. But, more on that shortly. So today, we dive deep into the man who may shape more of the future than any man in history.

The man behind Dall•E, ChatGPT and the man who most would say has flown the closest to sun in conquering the Turing Test, our quest for artificial general intelligence. First though, let’s start at the beginning.

Early years

Sam Altman's beginnings can be traced back to The Windy City, Chicago, where he was born in 1985. The city was abuzz not only due to baby Sam gracing the planet but also because a kid from North Carolina by the name of Michael Jordan was just gracing the court (shout out to the 80’s kids).

Jordan may have had the greatest cultural impact in the last 50 years, Sam may have the greatest impact for the next 1000.

Chicago, was a vibrant city known for its influential architecture and rich history, Altman's journey to success was initiated by his formative years at the John Burroughs School in St. Louis.

Young ‘Sama’ went on to pursue his passions for technology and finance at Stanford University, diving head first into the realms of computer science and economics. These formative years seem to have lit a fire inside of Sam, and shaped the man we know today.

And alongside Sam, his brother Jack, with who he’d later found Hydrazine Capital, was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. You know your brother is gifted when you are the un-successful brother, founding HR tech startup, Lattice, last valued at a paltry $3B (Athyna are happy users - thanks Jack).

Loopt

The next door opened for Altman, when he co-founded Loopt, first called Radiate, in 2005, around the idea of location sharing. The idea being that you could find your friends on map at any time because Loopt would use their GPS to coordinate. Pretty nice idea, if you ask me.

It wasn’t just Sam in this endeavour though, he convinced Stanford alum Nick Sivo and Alok Deshpande to join him. The three of them actually started the company while studying and dropped out to found it.

But it was Sam that was the driving force. His momentum is relentless and it was evident even back then. It was proving increasingly difficult to convince his partners, all then ~19 years of age to commit to flying to Boston to Y-Combinator (then called Summer Founders Program), now hailed as the world’s premier startup Accelerator and the breeding ground of Stripe, Airbnb, Instacart, and more recently, the newly minted decacorn, Deel and more.

Sam was not only able to convince his partners but also Paul Graham, then running the accelerator that they were fit to be part of it. This stage of Sam’s journey brings me to something he said a few years later when talking about doing sales for Loopt:

I think it works on many levels throughout his time with Loopt. Sam would not only knock on the right doors, he and is 130lb frame would do their best to kick them wide open.

Graham’s partner Jessica Livingston would go on to say about this period: “Paul wrote back, kind of trying to blow him off, saying, ‘You’re only a freshman. Just apply next year.'” Altman replied, “I’m a sophomore. And I’m coming.”

Loopt went on to become what some would call successful (others not). Sam himself was once quoted saying that selling Loopt left him with a feeling of “perennial sadness”.

“I was really proud of that deal,” he said. “Given the market dynamics, and where we were, I went off and got a good deal for the investors. To this day, it hurts me that one of them does not feel that way.” The overall story of Loopt looked something like this:

• Successfully raised $30M+ from investors, including a $5M Series A that included Sequoia and NEA, two of the world’s best venture firms.

• Was able to scale to somewhere between 3-5 million users by 2010 (reports vary).

• And was subsequently acquired by the Green Dot Corporation for $43.4 million March 2012.

Not the hit-it-out-of-the-park success his investors were expecting. But a first foray for young Altman. Sam would go on to make a reported, $5M from the sale.

Y-Combinator

So next, Altman, flush with a mini-success, a little bit of cash and a growing reputation started to get more and more involved in Summer Founders Program, now going by it’s current moniker, Y-Combinator.

Sam became a partner at Y Combinator in 2011, initially working there on a part-time basis, but in February 2014, Altman was shockingly named president of Y Combinator by its co-founder, Paul Graham. I say shockingly because it would stun many in the industry, Sam being 20 years Paul’s junior and not having the same kind of successes that the who’s who of the valley could boast.

But Graham saw something in Altman. In his now famous blog from 2009, titled Five Founders, Graham outlines his ‘five most interesting founders of the last 30 years’. The list actually had six founders as it included Larry & Sergey from Google as if they were one person.

But the list started with Steve Jobs, included both Google founders and ended with Sam Altman.

Let me put that into perspective, Sama at the time had achieved nothing. He was a 23 year old pup with a startup that at the time was doing ok. But Graham knew he had it. What is it in relation to Altman?

The it is Ambition. This leads us to our first takeaway in terms of why Sam Altman is a force unto himself. He has unending ambition. A relentless desire to get what he wants. And am ambition to change the world.

This is a character trait he shares with few others that we know as household names. Elon has it in spades. They are exactly alike in this respect in my mind.

But does Zuck? Definitely not. Bezoz, maybe. They both have the ambition but do they have an unwavering ambition to tackle the world biggest issues.

The Wright brothers had ambition. Nikola Tesla had ambition. Sam Altman has ambition. Anywho, back to Y-Combinator.

So after taking the reigns in 2014 Sam was able to make some massive, positive changes at YC. Not everything worked. But some did. And people were taking notice. Marc Andreessen, Co-Founder of Andreessen Horowitz, and father of the web browser declared, “Under Sam, the level of YC’s ambition has gone up 10x.”

Graham, was quoted as saying Sama was interesting in making serious inroads towards “curing cancer, fusion, supersonic airliners, A.I.. I think his goal is to make the whole future.”

It wasn’t just his own ambition or the ambition of YC that Sam was able to force his will upon. If it weren’t for Sam’s ambition, you could safely assume that Airbnb, would not exist today.

In a famous interaction between Airbnb’s Brian Chesky and Sam: “We had limited our projected revenue to thirty million dollars,” Chesky said. “Sam said, ‘Take all the “M”s and make them “B”s.’ ” Altman told them, “Either you don’t believe everything you said in the rest of the deck, or you’re ashamed, or I can’t do math.”

Next time you go and check into your favourite yurt or treehouse or abandoned medieval castle, make sure to not forget to raise a glass to Sam.

Sam was so ambitious at YC, that at one point two partners sat him down “and told him, ‘Slow down, chill out!’”

But although Sam was a great fit for the role at YC, he wasn’t long for it. By 2020, Sam had left YC to focus full-time on OpenAI, a (once) non-profit he co-founded with Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys and YC Research.

Sam’s plan was to move to full-time across into the role as CEO to work on one of the world’s biggest problems come opportunities, safeguarding and building our shared future with artificial intelligence.

Sam, the investor

I’d like to take a quick aside before diving head first into Sam’s current role as CEO of OpenAI to talk about Sam’s history as an investor.

Because if you think Sam has been successful in his solo career and founder, leader and operator, you’ll be shocked see what how many cheques he has written into the startups we count as household names.

Again, let’s get some perspective in here. Sam wrote in 2014 that he had five companies that has 100X’d in value. Read it again. It’s bonkers.

Altman invests in tech startups and nuclear energy companies. His portfolio is over 400 companies including Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Asana, Pinterest, Teespring, and more, making him one of Silicon Valley’s most active investors.

EDITORS NOTE: I recently co-invested with Sama in Humane, the next generation AI pin, that was launched a couple of months back.

He is also chairman of the board for Helion and Oklo, two nuclear energy companies. In terms of his Helion investment, it was a sizeable investment, weighing in at $375M.

I’m not going to do public maths here but if Sam has had five portco’s 100x and he has the liquidity to cut $375M cheques it’s safe to assume he’s one of the most successful angels in history.

Sam famously holds no stock in OpenAI. He has said: "I don't need equity in OpenAI because I already have enough money. I'm motivated by other things, like the mission of the company and the impact we can have on the world."

The right choice it seems and also an easy one it seems.

When discussing takeaways to Sam’s you have to talk about the osmosis he created by putting himself in the right rooms and at the right times. If you have the ambition to change the world, you sure as hell better be grabbing coffee and walking your dog with those who are doing the same.

The playbook Sam runs by getting in front of the right people is something we can all take inspiration from.

OpenAI

As we mentioned earlier, OpenAI was founded in 2015, as a non-profit research company, dedicated to the safe and ethical development of artificial general intelligence.

Sama, believes that AI has the potential to solve some of the world's most pressing problems, but he also believes that it is important to be careful about how AI is developed and used.

A future in which we are all working for Skynet, or are in love with our robotic companions seems straight out of Black Mirror but it deserves enough credit in the real world to be taken seriously.

After all, a 0.01% of humans being eradicated by machines is slim in odds, high in impact. Very high you would say.

But with the healthy fear inside of Sam, there is also an excitement and positivity that is palpable.

So come, the late 2010’s, the team at OpenAI started working on some of the most exciting technology today, large language models (LLMs). An LLM is a specialised type of artificial intelligence that has been trained on vast amounts of text to understand existing content and generate original content from that.

In other words they are super-predictors. The first of these language models, GPT-2, was announced in 2019. In its largest form, it had 1.5 billion parameters, a measure of the number of adjustable connections between its crude artificial neurons.

And the company made GPT-2’s successor, GPT-3, announced in 2020, still bigger, with a whopping 175 billion parameters. No one knows how many parameters GPT-4 was trained on, but it is rumoured to be trillions.

All while this is going on, OpenAI’s Dall•E and Midjourney are creating fever dream style AI art that is going viral all over the internet.

Controversially, in 2019, OpenAI pivoted to a hybrid ‘capped-profit’ model. Since then, in November 2022, the company took the world by storm and dropped the release of ChatGPT, built on top of their GPT-4 model.

Not only did this become the fastest growing product in history (soon surpassed by Meta’s Threads) but it sent Google into a red alert. For the first time in living memory, the greatest business model in history, search, was at risk. And it all happened in the blink of an eye.

Next came Microsoft’s mammoth investment into the company, putting OpenAI’s market valuation between $27 billion and $29 billion as of April 2023.

The craziest thing in all of this is that Bing, Microsoft’s oft maligned search engine was relevant again, overnight, if only for a moment.

Recently, Sam seems to be on a worldwide PR tour, trying his best to position himself and OpenAI as the leaders when it comes to AI infrastructure, and governance in the market. Things were going swimmingly too. Up until the November 17th, 2023 anyway.

The weirdest firing in technology

At this point in the story, Sam is on a roll. He’s launched the faster growing product in history, gone on a worldwide speaking tour where he rubbed shoulders with world leaders and a finished it up with a Steve Jobs like mic drop at the announcement of the GPT store.

And then he was fired. No one really knows how or why these decisions were made — but they were. It was a true Game of Thrones like spectacle. I am sure we will find out in a the biography of Sam Altman 10-20 years from now but for now we just need to listen relay on the here-say.

One thing we know if that after a wild week in tech (and the Twitter-verse) order was restored and we were back to business as usual.

Meanwhile, in VC land, money still is being thrown around like crazy to find the next challenger to OpenAI. Anthropic, AI21, Cohere, Character.AI, and more are on the chase, but so is big tech.

Google’s Bard often goes head to head in research against ChatGPT today with ChatGPT seeming to have never-ending hallucinations when asked relatively simple questions.

Interestingly though, as recently as April, Sam was quoted by saying: “I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant models. We'll make them better in other ways.”

Whether this is a giant head fake to all of OpenAI’s competitors, or if we genuinely shouldn’t be expecting GPT-5, 6 & 7 to come and start solving the worlds problems, time will tell. And hey, maybe we do end up creating “the paperclip maximiser,” a scenario that the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom raised in 2003 where an ill-programmed AI turns all matter on earth to paperclips.

Whatever the leading form of AI development looks like as we head in to this next stage, one thing we do know, is that Sama will be at the forefront of it.

Playbook

Here, I’d like to detail what I think makes Sama great, why he outperforms and why most would bet on him to play a massive part in the future of technology and humanity as a whole.

• Ambition. Unlike other entrepreneurs, Sam isn’t concerned with things that do not make massive inroads into moving humanity forward. He was famous at YC for not caring about the specifics of what people were building but he would obsess over how they impact the future.

• Long-term vision. Sam is not concerned with short-term profits. He is focused on building companies that will have a lasting impact on the world.

• Success by osmosis. Sam is the ultimate networker. He is constantly in the right rooms, with the right people. He also apparently racks up 6,000 talking minutes in a month. He is always active within his community.

• Persistence. Sam does not take no for an answer. All good founders have this. Building a company is an inherently negative process. A game of “no’s”. Not for Sam, no is only a sound. He gives no real meaning to the word.

• First principles thinking. Sam’s mind works backwards from the biggest problems. He doesn’t sweat the small stuff but rather tackles large, worthwhile problems head on by going to the root of the problem.

Fun facts

• Altman is a doomsday prepper: “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

• Sam was also the CEO of Reddit for eight days (yes, 1 day more than a week) in 2014 after CEO Yishan Wong resigned.

• He is also gay. In prep school, Sam addressed the whole community, announcing that he was gay and asking whether the school wanted to be a repressive place or one open to different ideas.
  “What Sam did changed the school. It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world.”

• In his personal life, Sam is married and has two children. He is an avid tennis player and enjoys spending time with his family.

• Altman co-founded Tools For Humanity in 2019, a company building a global iris-based biometric system using cryptocurrency, called Worldcoin. Worldcoin aims to provide a reliable way to authenticate humans online.

Extra reading

• By endurance we conquer - March, 2013.

• Advice for ambitious 19 year olds - June, 2013.

• How to be successful - Jan, 2019.

• How to invest in startups - Jan 2020.

• Idea generation - May, 2020.

And that's it! You can find Sam most active on Twitter @Sama and also on his blog. Also, of course OpenAI to follow along for any product updates.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

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If you have not read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, do yourself a favour. 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

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See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
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And that’s it from me. See you next week.