Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
Interesting article giving more of an inside look to the organization and its people. Some choice quotes and comments from a random dude on the internet:<p>&gt; After conferring with the accelerator’s sixteen other partners, Altman launched an initiative to support startups even earlier in their life span, and a fund to continue investing in them as they grow.<p>&gt; “Sam said, ‘Take all the “M”s and make them “B”s.’ ”<p>Badass. Reminded me of &quot;Drop the &#x27;The&#x27;&quot;.<p>&gt; A 2012 study of North American accelerators found that almost half of them had failed to produce a single startup that went on to raise venture funding.<p>It&#x27;s very much a &quot;me-too&quot; endeavor, almost political at the universities local to where I live, aimed at appearing to &quot;foster innovation&quot; and justifying huge continued government loans for their &quot;customers&quot;.<p>&gt; YC provides instant entrée to Silicon Valley—a community that, despite its meritocratic rhetoric, typically requires a “warm intro” from a colleague, who is usually a white man.<p>Yes the meritocratic aspect of networking is far overblown. Intros or bust in my experience, unless someone gives you a lucky break. If they do, be grateful and be damn sure to impress that person.<p>&gt; All the early arrivals at the party were men; the batch’s female founders were attending a presentation on the challenges of being a female founder.<p>Anyone else find this kind of ironic and counterproductive?<p>&gt; “But 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.”<p>This is funny, he almost sounds like one of those awful Trump supporters! :P<p>&gt; In 2012, he and the other founders sold the company for forty-three million dollars—a negative return for their V.C.s.<p>This isn&#x27;t as bad as it sounds. Losing a few million dollars vs. around $50M is a huge difference. In fact I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s harder to salvage a failing company that exit a successful one.<p>&gt; “you want to invest in messy, somewhat broken companies. You can treat the warts on top, and because of the warts the company will be hugely underpriced.”<p>Value investing, absolutely. I tend to apply this principle on a smaller scale, to individual people. For example, I&#x27;ve had the opportunity to hire and work with extremely intelligent and hardworking people who simply lacked some basic English skills, and had shit cover letters. But who cares if they can program a robotic system the way I need.<p>&gt; “hard things are actually easier than easy things. Because people feel it’s interesting, they want to help. Another mobile app? You get an eye roll. A rocket company? Everyone wants to go to space.”<p>So incredibly true. I have a startup with very few resources but no problem recruiting because the field is exciting hard tech.<p>&gt; “Most people do too many things. Do a few things relentlessly.”<p>The best advice for life success, hands down.<p>&gt; “What’s it looking for?” I asked Altman. “I have no idea,” he replied. “That’s the unsettling thing about neural networks—you have no idea what they’re doing, and they can’t tell you.”<p>Well I find this response - which someone in the domain would tell you isn&#x27;t even correct - to be unsettling. Yes, we can see what lots of neural networks are doing, and understand it [but you often need a PhD].<p>&gt; “Sam’s program for the world is anchored by ideas, not people,” Peter Thiel said. “And that’s what makes it powerful—because it doesn’t immediately get derailed by questions of popularity.”<p>But &quot;Why do these fuckers get to decide what happens to me?&quot;<p>&gt; Paul Graham cheerfully acknowledged that, by instilling message discipline, “we help the bad founders look indistinguishable from the good ones.”<p>This would make me a little unsettled as an external investor but I understand the incentives and dynamics at play.<p>&gt; So we used accounts protected, a number that showed roughly thirty-per-cent growth through the course of YC—and about forty per cent of the accounts were YC companies. It was a perfect fairy-tale story.”<p>Yeah this never made too much sense to me. As an investor I&#x27;d be wary of a startup using alumni connections to secure a large portion of their customers, because that eventually runs out - meaning the acquistion strategy is still essentially untested. As a founder though, I really like this strategy and would readily replicate it.<p>&gt; The truth is that rapid growth over a long period is rare, that the repeated innovation required to sustain it is nearly impossible, and that certain kinds of uncontrollable growth turn out to be cancers.<p>I forgot exactly where I learned this, but I like the story of &quot;multiple S curves&quot; over a single &quot;J&quot; curve. Businesses innovate and attach new markets, launch new product lines, secure new customer segments, etc.<p>&gt; Peter Thiel, the forty-eight-year-old libertarian who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, secretly funded the lawsuit that drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy, and has sought to extend his life span by taking human growth hormone.<p>Damn so is Thiel gonna get jacked? This makes me feel less bad about wanting to do a steroid cycle when I&#x27;m older.<p>&gt; The fear is that YC will soon provide cradle-to-I.P.O. funding for so many top startups that it will put a lot of V.C.s out of business.<p>Well this is why I find them remarkably pro-founder: they are creating competition at the VC level even if the later stages.<p>&gt; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.<p>Who knew, even billionaires get high and watch The Matrix.<p>&gt; recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting out the youth vote.<p>Encouraging youth voting will absolutely be partisan, let&#x27;s not kid ourselves here. Why not just pay people to vote, or give them deals at retail stores? I&#x27;m sure these things will happen.<p>&gt; As I considered this, he said that he’d sacrifice a hundred thousand. I told him that my own tally would be even larger. “It’s a bug,” he declared, unconsoled.<p>It&#x27;s a feature.<p>&gt; the cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food.<p>Here&#x27;s my controversial theory: a &quot;great life&quot; only exists relative to others. Once all needs are provided for and people don&#x27;t need each other (and here&#x27;s the real controversial idea: most women won&#x27;t need most men, something that I would understandably expect Altman to miss), they won&#x27;t be incentivized to create and maintain strong family units. We won&#x27;t love like we used to. But maybe they see this as a &quot;bug&quot; too.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m wrong and a few centuries of tech will solve the problems of human nature created by a few million years of evolution.<p>&gt; More generally, he observed, “The missing circuit in my brain, the circuit that would make me care what people think about me, is a real gift. Most people want to be accepted, so they won’t take risks that could make them look crazy—which actually makes them wildly miscalculate risk.”<p>A gift and a curse that I wrestle with constantly.<p>&gt; “At the end of his life, when he may have been somewhat senile, he did also say that it should all be sunk to the bottom of the ocean. There’s something worth thinking about in there.”<p>This was a great read and it made me think a lot, it was a pleasure.