Lessons from Sam Altman: On Belief, Ambition, and High-Impact Careers
"Sam Altman can't be stopped by such flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he's going to be… there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want."
Sam Altman's career fascinates me. He went from a teen founder failing to get traction, to President of Y Combinator, to founder of OpenAI. Those seem like big, random jumps.
It's easy to think Altman's career has been littered with luck. Sure, luck played a part — as it always does — but the deeper you dig the clearer it becomes that luck was nothing more than a footnote in his story. Altman navigated those big, random jumps flawlessly and now finds himself at the helm of the most exciting company in the world.
How did he get that good?
Altman's first startup was Loopt, a location-based social networking app. The company was founded in 2005 and was initially funded by Y Combinator. In 2012, it was acquired for $43 million. Loopt had more than five million users but is alleged to have struggled to gain traction. It was a passive location-tracking app — once you turned it on, it continued to tell your friends where you were. At that time, those apps were the new darlings of tech. It became only the latest location app to be acquired and see its own product shut down, following others like Gowalla and Yobongo.
In 2014, Altman became the President of YC. Becoming President of YC after going through the program is like becoming Dean of Harvard after being a student.
Altman was the second-ever President and was hand-picked by Paul Graham. Why? Because he really, really impressed Paul Graham.
Graham wrote an essay in 2009 listing Altman alongside Steve Jobs and Larry/Sergey as the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years. Graham notes (emphasis mine):
I was told I shouldn't mention founders of YC-funded companies in this list. But Sam Altman can't be stopped by such flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he's going to be… there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.
Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I ask "What would Steve do?" but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask "What would Sama do?”
That's not just impressing someone. That's knocking their socks off. How did he do it?
Altman Has Off-the-Charts Ambition
Altman exudes extreme belief and ambition in everything he does. He shows ridiculous conviction in his decisions and I suspect that combination of belief and conviction create the "force of will" that Paul Graham uses to describe him.
I’ve studied Steve Jobs deeply and Altman shares this trait with him. Jobs was famous for what observers called his “reality distortion field.” Part motivational tactic, part drive and ambition, he was notoriously dismissive of phrases like “It can’t be done” or “We need more time.”
Jobs learned early in life that reality was falsely framed by rules and compromises that people had been taught as children. He had a much more aggressive idea of what was or wasn’t possible. To him, when you factored in vision and work ethic, much of life was malleable.
Altman sees life through the same lens:
“A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are” - Sam Altman
Brian Chesky, founder of AirBnB, tells a story about Altman that showcases this trait. Chesky shared that when they entered YC, they had doubts about their survival, but their ambition grew as they progressed in the program. That growth was largely due to their interaction with Altman, who was then an unpaid mentor and fundraising expert at YC.
When the Airbnb team presented Altman with a slide deck for a $500,000 seed funding round, Altman encouraged them to increase their projected revenue from $30 million to $3 billion. Altman said, 'Take all the M’s and make them B’s. Either you don't believe everything you said in the rest of the deck, or you're ashamed, or I can't do math."
Altman displayed this willingness to think big throughout his tenure at YC, growing the organisation rapidly during his time there1. Similarly, his vision for OpenAI is marked by audacity and a willingness to embrace the unknown.
When asked about the company's revenue model in 2019, Altman candidly admitted that they had no plans or ideas for generating revenue, and instead stated that their goal is to build a generally intelligent system that can figure out how to generate returns for investors. This statement may seem outlandish to some — it drew a lot of laughter from the crowd — but it’s a testament to Altman's unwavering confidence in his ability to achieve the impossible.
Sam’s Guide to Taking Over the World
Much of Altman’s success comes from his ability to compound himself and his work.
"You want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory. It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect—most careers progress fairly linearly." - Altman
His essay — 'How to be Successful' — is a playbook for building a compounding career. Mastering any one of the ideas will make you pretty damn good. Mastering multiple will make you unstoppable.
These are some of my favourites (all quotes from the above-linked essay):
Selectiveness in what you work on:
“I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.
Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes.”
Long-term vision:
“I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together. One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.”
Appetite for risk:
The average person spends too much time accumulating optionality and too little time taking risks.
People pursue optionality because they think that going after something like starting a company is financially and socially risky. But if your aim is to build something great, the bigger risk is not that you fail, it's that you don't get enough shots on goal to do something amazing.
How Altman thinks about risk:
“Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward. Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time—you have to try many things and adapt quickly as you learn more.
It’s often easier to take risks early in your career; you don’t have much to lose, and you potentially have a lot to gain. Once you’ve gotten yourself to a point where you have your basic obligations covered you should try to make it easy to take risks. Look for small bets you can make where you lose 1x if you’re wrong but make 100x if it works. Then make a bigger bet in that direction.
One of the reasons it’s so difficult to take risks is because of the status sacrifice that comes with it. If you know you could be working at Google but choose to explore other things instead, failure hurts twice as much. It's the pain of failing plus the status you gave up on by forging your own path.
But if you want to make a mark on the world, it’s something you have to do:
The issue is that without taking risk, you can't exploit any opportunities. You can live a quiet and reasonably happy life, but you are unlikely to create something new, and you are unlikely to make your mark on the world. — Marc Andreessen
Differentiation:
Altman’s path has been anything but predictable. The result: he’s done things that are rare and valuable and there's now nobody that can do what he does.
“Most people understand that companies are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with. This is important, and obviously true. But this holds true for you as an individual as well. If what you do can be done by someone else, it eventually will be, and for less money.
The best way to become difficult to compete with is to build up leverage. For example, you can do it with personal relationships, by building a strong personal brand, or by getting good at the intersection of multiple different fields. There are many other strategies, but you have to figure out some way to do it.
Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.”
Network:
“An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can. Doing this, over a long period of time, is what lead to most of my best career opportunities and three of my four best investments. I’m continually surprised how often something good happens to me because of something I did to help a founder ten years ago.”
What would Sama do?
Studying Sam and his approach to company and career building allows you to ask yourself "What would Sama do?" I've been trying this recently and it's proving to be a powerful tool for making bolder, more ambitious decisions.
I find it intimidating to look at Altman - and what he’s achieved in a short space of time - and then look at myself. It’s daunting to think about how to be that successful. That’s what makes it an important exercise.
The thing I keep repeating to myself is: don't shy away from the parts that hurt. Don't skip the parts you don’t want to hear because they make you feel incapable. They're the parts you have to lean into because they're where you're lacking. Rip off the bandaid, take note of the work you have to do, and get to it.
Altman has noted that he ran YC at a time when literally anyone could have experienced enormous success. It was the golden age for Silicon Valley.