Greg
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
The early openAI team is clearly superb. What's even more impressive to me, is that the quality of the team has remained incredibly strong as the team grew to 45+ people: IMO/IOI medalists, startup founders and key contributors, world-class Phd's who could easily get tenure-track positions at top universities, etc. [1] [2]
It's not uncommon for a startup to have a strong founding team. It's almost unheard of that just about every single individual of a 45+ person team is objectively exceptional.[3]
Not sure how much Greg is still involved in recruiting, but either way, congrats.
(No affiliation to OpenAI, besides knowing a few people there)
[1] https://openai.com/blog/team-update-january/ [2] https://openai.com/blog/team-update-august/ [3] I don't know any startups in which all of the first 50 employees were truly exceptional prior to them joining the company. I guess Google, for example, might have had an incredibly strong early team, but I'm not sure they were as strong prior to them joining Google.
For the latter, I'd bet many of the smartest people here would want to do the crud work, even if they're not cofounders. The job of the ideal co-founder is to spread a mission that matters this much to everyone who would be fit to achieve it, inspiring all employees to be as committed. Well, OpenAI powered relentlessly by Greg, has inspired thousands of volunteers and open-source contributors in addition to it's top-notch staff.
Equal opportunity to pay, or actually democratizing it so that anybody who wants to use it can reap the benefits?
I'm willing to bet it's not the latter, given the reliance of AI on large training corpuses and machine time.
Although, you do make a good point. If only the most powerful companies can afford meaningful machine time, how democratized can AI be?
That's the big trick that nobody seems to give a shit about, as they scramble around to make a buck.
Having the research or even the code doesn't really give you an advantage. We're just trading one set of overlords for another.
-- Jeffrey Hammerbacher
I'm guilty as charged (at least it's about entertaining & useful ads) - but in my post-exit career I'd also be humbled to work on something with this magnitude and relevancy.
In the middle of the tech bubble it's easy to forget how the rest of the world will deal with this bubble with increasing automation, inequality and climate change. It's great to see some people actually tackling the really important topics even if they could get a 6-7 digit paycheck at top Tech companies.
Missing, of course, the strongest possibility, which is that said instrument, either covertly or overtly, is the big player which is calling the shots.
I maintain a version-controlled text file of people I want to hire for my startup, should hell ever freeze over and I secure funding some day.
The nice part is that doing so usually goes hand-in-hand with the product/market/technology research you conduct anyways, so the practice has a very low time investment attached to it. For the most part, you simply stumble upon desirable people during the course of seemingly unrelated research, dig into their background, and then add them to the list.
On a humorous note, quite a few people on my list later ended up being hired by YC HARC. Hey Sam, what are the finer points of YC companies* trying to hire talent attached to YC projects? Can you offer any pointers? :)
* Not a YC company (yet).
Your low self-esteem is sabotaging you.
Sorry for not making that more clear. My smiley face budget had already been reached by the latter portion of that post. Anything exceeding one smiley and you end up looking like you're on something, especially on HN. Heck, even just one can be suspect!
It's turtles all the way down. :)
(1) On a practical level, although I don't know Greg's personal financial situation, he was the CTO of Stripe for five years. He's rich enough not to work. He works exactly because he's enthusiastic.
(2) Secondly, to say that Greg merely handles logistics for OpenAI is to willfully ignore the post as written, and the reality on the ground.
Also, I'm not sure Sam is a billionaire, although well on his way.
It would have been fine if he was just telling a story about his own life, but when he said "make sure you also have someone like Greg" it became fair to point out that he seems a little bit oblivious as to context.
Sure, maybe it is a generalizable description of virtuous qualities but it also strikes me as something different and much worse. Here's another interpretation "I sure am fortunate that I know this wealthy, well-connected person who helps me with my businesses that require knowing wealthy, well-connected people."
>I'm a convicted felon who provides sound financial advice - it's a nice pet to have.
The best takeaway for Technical / SV minded folks in this posting is quite clear: The odds of success are greatly enhanced when you have a Top Flight Communicator at your disposal. An ability to "walk amongst the tribes" is very important. It's a lot like getting various human systems into harmony / unison (nerves and cardiovascular for instance).
I can state from first-hand experience with Bids/RFPs for projects worth tens of thousands to billions that the most important person in the room is the Proposal Coordinator and they get the least respect and compensation out of the gate. It's realistically a horribly stressful job that is only rewarding to a very select group of people, one of which happens to be me. I've learned how to herd cats.
If I wanted to be, uh, less generous in my perspective, the Machiavellian perspective is much more clear: "Manipulating people is a profitable enterprise."
That's why I have a photo of Winston Wolf in my peripheral vision every day at work, because his motto makes the most sense in a world plagued by Murphy's Laws...
>My name is Winston Wolf. I solve problems.
From another 10,000 feet up, here is a simple observation: All across the US, from the largest cities to the smallest crossroad communities, there are solo founders of successful auto repair shops, auto body shops, dentist practices, CPA practices, rental property ownership and management, pizza carryout shops, Chinese carry out shops, Mobil Travel Guide five star restaurants, pediatrician practices, manufacturer representative practices, big-truck, little-truck businesses of wide variety, etc. where commonly the cash to start the business is higher than that of servers, domain name, and Internet connection of a Web site.
So, solo founders do relatively well in main street startups. Since co-founders are not crucial for main street business and since a Web site startup should be in most ways easier, why are co-founders crucial for Web site startups? Since co-founder disputes are so common and potentially destructive, why be so eager to have co-founders and so down on solo founders?
With the above, to me, hiring a co-founder as a recruiter, office peace maker, general evangelist, smiling face, optimistic, good hand shake, meeter and greeter who knows a lot of people is a big slice of cash and equity for the usual thin budget of a startup.
Or, as we often hear, the crucial work of a startup is to keep the burn rate as low as possible and ASAP please the customers/users and get to earnings. In this case, an office peace maker, etc. is at best a nice to have if for free, otherwise not a must have for free, and likely too expensive if have to pay much.
Absolute top talent? I think you are blinded by the light of YC. Not everyone thinks that or even close to it. [1] [2] By way of example I am reminded when I told a young person that I was helping to look on the page of a vc/angel investor that I do work for and know (among many). I said 'look at what they are doing I can get you an easy interview at any of those companies even if they don't have an opening'. They looked (was a woman iim) and said 'no thanks looks like they are all doing strange weird stuff'. This particular person preferred a traditional and solid company I am guessing, not a shot at the moon. And there are plenty of people like that. Plenty of smart capable people in the world and not all would die to work for a YC company or YC affiliated venture.
[1] Note I make money off the shot at the moon company so don't take this as some kind of sour grapes..
[2] And while most people know who Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos are (what I will call 'the aunt' test) most people have never heard of Sam, PG or YC for that matter.
Sure, but most software engineers probably have. While companies need a lot more than just engineers, having a leg up on engineering recruitment (especially as a very early-stage startup) seems extremely valuable.
All I will say is that I worked at Stripe very briefly -- for about three months -- when the company was about thirty people (before I went on to go through YC). Greg was incredibly generous with his time in explaining and working with me as a non-engineer.
I don't think he had been named CTO yet (Stripe was quite title phobic at the start) but it was clear that he was both a technical and non-technical leader of the company. He spent time to explain code and architecture to me, while also chatting through cultural norms and various organizational tensions Stripe was experiencing as it grew.
I think the acculturation to Stripe that he very deliberately supported in me was critical for what (little) success I had with Standard Treasury.
This is all to say that Sama’s post is spot on in my experience. Greg exhibited every one of the mentioned characteristics (except recruiting, I didn’t interacting with him on that) even when working with someone with which he didn’t have to be so generous.
Went to MIT
Went to Harvard
Was CTO of a 10 billion dollar company for 5 years, starting the year it was founded
Yeah, I'd take a cofounder like that.
a) Technical support b) someone to bounce ideas off of constantly. c) someone to support the organization should he need to take an unexpected leave.
Starting something new is incredibly hard. The default is that your company never even forms, and it's on you to overcome the activation energy. I don't think I'd have the mental fortitude to stick that out alone.
In contrast, there's nothing more motivating than working with great people (and it's hard to do better than Ilya, Sam, and Elon). Everyone brings their own core strengths to the table, and if you've picked well your own efforts will be multiplied.
Which of your qualities specifically do you feel are actually under discussion here, and how would you recommend others build, enhance or foster those qualities if they wanted to do so?
In other words, assuming someone wanted to, how would they become more "Greg?"
Do I really need to say anything more?
Clearly he is a very impressive person with very impressive results and I'm sure I'd enjoy working at a company with him, or people like him.
I don't like this myth though. Startups are chaos, and pretending that as long as you have this magical person there solving all your problems that your chaos is somehow incorrect. The startup I worked for was full of normal imperfect humans who got offended, had trouble figuring out the direction of the company, were not world-class recruiters, were not always thoughtful and ran into problems big and small all the time. The company didn't die because there was a group of dedicated, imperfect people, who didn't want the company to die, not because there was one "Chief Optimist" holding it all together. If there was a "Chief Optimist" role, it was a very mobile position based on who was feeling best at that particular moment.
This isn't to say you can't and shouldn't actively try to make yourself better [1], you should. But you don't need a perfectly formed person working at your startup for it to succeed. And I want to note, I'm not disputing the existence of superhuman individuals, they exist and I'm sure power a lot of amazing achievements. You just don't need them to succeed, a bunch of normal people can do it too.
1: For whatever definition of better you want, in this context it would probably mean being a better startup founder
As long as you believe you can find such force of will within yourself, you too can be a little bit like Greg.
But beware: there is only one Greg. Don't try to be Greg, because you are you and will never be Greg. Instead, follow in Greg's example. Learn from Greg.
Find the force of will inside you. Practice your communication and empathy skills. And prepare to work your butt off. In other words, be a little like Greg. And maybe you'll find success in the startup world.
My bet is there are a lot of potential "Gregs" out there with the qualities Sam describes, but wasting away under-employed as Mid-Senior individual contributors at BigCorpXyz, like the stereotypical Oscar-capable actress waiting tables trying to get discovered. All it takes is the courage to recognize potential--they can be found!
Epic, lovely understatement there!
Greg is the guy you need. Not necessarily the guy you want to be.
While I don't dispute the power of stress and pressure to light a fire under someone's ass, I don't think it should come in the form of a person's livelihood.
For example, it's not hard to imagine founder(s) that have been working for years on something with no pay, putting them far behind their traditionally-employed peers. They may even have family obligations on top of that. Proceeding to then pay them low wages in the interest of motivation isn't exactly the best idea.
Granted, I do tend to agree with the ethos of having the founder being the lowest-paid employee in the company. Ideally that just ensures everyone else is paid really, really well.
I don't like industries that institutionalize the consumption of individuals enthusiasm or altruism. We've essentially lost medicine to the latter and it sucks to see the startup scene consumed by the former.
I think he took on the risk when he bought into it.
But yeah.
Specifically for this context, if Musk and Altman conspired to do wrong by someone, it would be much easier to 'quietly beat them with a $5 wrench' than to engineer and construct OpenAI to publicly serve some cold dish. That's not to say it's all warm and fuzzy, but businesses that can succeed on aligned interests are better than those that seek cut throat markets.
I don't think that's true. At least at the beginning, a "Greg" will be the person who has all the direct contact with mentors, investors, team, suppliers, and customers. A "Greg" will be the "business face" of things (not necessarily who the public see, but who everyone else sees). That's a very good position to be in when things fail or when the company exits.
CEOs go on to start something new. CTOs start interviewing for a new role. People who are a "Greg" find offers coming to them.
This ignores the mental toll that exhausting yourself on a company takes though. There are lots of people that start companies, but many people quit when the going gets tough. Those that commit everything to it are praised when they succeed but mostly forgotten when they don't. I am just now recovering after several months of not working, catching up on years of lost sleep, and basically becoming a person again.
There are days when I regret it and there are days when I don't. I learned a hell of a lot and I recognize it has opened doors for me, but the real question is was it worth it? And that's going to be different for everybody.
An important note, which is particularly relevant for HN. Paul Graham once said Sam Altman was the right person working on the wrong problem (with regards to his company Loopt). I bet there are a lot of people like that who just commit themselves to the wrong thing.
If you learnt even one thing from the effort, then it was worth it. Not every endeavor will bring you financial rewards, at least not directly. If you took on the effort because you loved the idea, rewards will flow via other means.
It's easy after-the-fact to see that, but it's hard to know when it's happening. Possibly the most celebrated entrepreneur is Elon Musk, and I don't think there's any question he put his company before his personal life multiple times in order to succeed. But how many other people have done that and then failed? It can leave you as a shell of your former self.
Everybody talks about the upside. Nobody wants to talk about the downside.
But this is the point of life! The experience.
Now I'm onto something else.
There has to be this drive to do something different, something that you love and that will make a difference. Sometimes it takes more than one try to find that one thing.
It's the modern form of a luta continua, vitória é certa. How else would you succeed if you don't try, and fail, and fail...
That, or stick with your day job, even if it bores you to death.
(I am Greg, and am reasonably happy to be me.)
I think this reply is true. But even that aside, the startup philosophy that guides me is variance maximization. So yes, when starting something new and pouring your heart into it, you have a chance of having nothing concrete to show for yourself in a few years. But if you succeed, the magnitude will be much greater, and you'll have been a core force in making that happen.
I worked on a number of startup ideas in college, which never went anywhere. The first company I worked on that had any sort of success was Stripe (which I joined when we were 4 people). I've taken an identical approach (hard work and trying to cover the entire problem surface area) to each organization I've been a part of, and am pretty happy with recommending it as a general strategy.
Could you elaborate on that?
Maybe because Greg so loved the idea that compensation didn't not matter to him, just the satisfaction of doing what he loves. He's a champion, and those are the guys you want around you.
And a guy like Greg will always be needed somewhere.
A good project manager[0] to keep on top of everything and pick up all the miscellaneous tasks can/will make or break a startup.
[0] Well the title doesn't matter but I used PM so I will stick to that title.
We have a slightly alternative model: There hasn't been a consistent Greg 5+ years, but there is always a founder willing to be Greg when the previous Greg needs a break. Especially important once people start having children and go through the various ups and downs of life.
@Greg, perhaps you could talk a bit about what you think makes you a productive engineer and problem-solver. What's your workflow like, how do you approach a problem, or learning a new concept, what tools do you use, etc.
I wonder if that's a typo.
Why is this being praised?
Can't stand the "always on" economy. It's OK to not immediately to respond to things.
Hopefully, this article is simply not doing the Person justice and is simply poorly thought out and comes out as a superficial 'fluff' piece.
That means I often get (and win at) the second-in-command role, but I don't see that as being taken advantage of at all. I've made quite a good career of it and honestly and earnestly enjoy it.
Apparently, if you have a big enough vision, it's along the lines of "why aren't you working for my awesome ideas for free? I even gave you teeny amount of equity"