Ask HN: How did Sam Altman fail upward so well? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did Sam Altman fail upward so well?

245 pointsVirusNewbie118 comments

I'm constantly surprised by the fact that Sam Altman is the one in charge of OpenAI. As far as I know, he dropped out of college to start a company that folded (Edit: this is wrong, he sold it, was a bust for investors though), ended up advising companies at YCombinator, Paul G liked him, and he just sort of made lots of connections. Then he became CEO of Open AI? I'm likely missing a step, right?

Don't get me wrong, I don't think he's a moron or anything, but it's fascinating to me that he doesn't have ANY of the following things that I'd assume makes one qualified: * Published AI research * Sold a company * Worked at a Unicorn or top tech company * Reputation in OSS as a hacker/builder

Surely there's more to the story? Do people who he has advised at YCombinator all agree he's brilliant and insightful? What am I missing?

EDIT: I was wrong, he did sell a company. My mistake!

That does change things, but I'd like to hear more from people who have good things to say about him. Maybe he's given some amazing advice to really important companies that we're unaware of. It would be nice to hear more of how he got his reputation.

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I’ve talked to Sam once a long time ago which gives me a rudimentary answer to your curiosity. PG’s notes on Sam in that 2009 essay ring true to me (http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html).

> there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.

We discussed nuclear power which was an industry I left but dreamed of building a successful startup in. Sam asked me why I wasn’t building a startup in nuclear power if I thought the technology was so powerful. What I realized in what he was conveying was that if he had the same conviction he would have no doubt about the ability to drive it to success. The more experienced I get the more I value that type of conviction and determination. The more I also see that behavior being rewarded with results.

Sheer force of will has limits though. And we all make tradeoffs. Nuclear in particular has some pretty huge obstacles, both real and imaginary.

Folks who truly never compromise or give up are great, except when they pick the wrong horse.

I imagine what I’m missing most is how he handles those huge obstacles. We all can turn on sheer force of will for a set amount of time but keeping it buoyant in the face of huge obstacles is another matter entirely.

His company failed, selling for a bit over the amount of cash they burned. So he didn't handle huge obstacles. And at YC, it's the startups that have obstacles that need to be surmounted, not YC itself. YC has perpetuated the cult of the startup (and the cult of "you need YC for your startup to be successful") so well that they can take equity in a number of the world's tech startups very, very cheaply at the nascent, "fruit fly" stage, ensuring that YC has enough lottery tickets that some will pay off. It's the "startup factory" play, all the founders triumphs and tragedies are just so much grist for the mill.

YC is like a doctor which takes a 10% cut of the lifetime earnings of every baby they deliver. Adding some value, yes, and some kids won't earn very much, but the wealth earned by the new human would have almost certainly been earned regardless of the doctor's skill. And this doctor happens to deliver half the babies of the entire state of California.

The cult part was thanks to PaulG. As long as that continues, YC will be successful.

OpenAI was the result of a fear that big tech. was going to monopolize all the fruits from recent deep learning advances, because they had all the data and the money. That was the obvious new hotness to get into. Proprietary AI was an existential risk to VC livelihoods.

Idk but isn’t the OP asking how he has gotten where he is without having actually achieved any of those results?

I don’t know much about Sam Altman, but the OP listed a bunch of external signals which are just that.

My guess is the Sam has a solid combination of vision, determination, intelligence, realism and connections. Strong determination with all those other positive supports can take you a long way.

Sam also got the timing right: doubling down on AI just as the technology was ripe for it to flourish.

He’s just 37 years old, I’d say his accomplishments are pretty impressive for 37!

He dropped out of Stanford in 2005, at 19, to co-found Loopt. Yeah, it ultimately failed, but over 7 years they got 5 million users, raised $30 mil in funding, and were acquihired for $43.4 mil.

He was a YC partner at ~25, YC’s president at ~28, and seemed to do a good job leading it for ~5 years. He’s also been pretty personally successful as an Angel investor.

He was an early investor in OpenAI, left YC a few years ago to become their CEO, and they’ve done extremely well under him.

No, he’s not Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuck, etc., but his accomplishments at 37 are pretty damn good. I’m not really seeing how this is failing upwards?

Dropping out of school isn't really an accomplishment. Neither is failing at building a company despite raising $30 mil in funding.

Yeah, big deal, I could have dropped out of school and raised $30M to build a company when I was a teenager too, I just had other priorities

Sam's biggest success seems to be raising 30M USD. Everything else in his career is mediocre.

I see your point, but really it's "losing $30M of someone else's money" that OP is probably highlighting. On the other hand, not a lot of people let you gamble with $30M when you're that young. Just two opposite perspectives

I'd say getting into Stanford is one hell of an accomplishment though.

Are people of Jewish descent somehow disadvantaged by Affirmative Action?

Founding a company at 19 that hits some big milestones, and comes close to success despite ultimately failing, is still very impressive to me. Nobody bats 100, especially at the age of 19.

Also, from the outside, he seems to have been an impactful/successful leader at YC and now OpenAI. People who know him personally seem to thing he’s an extremely bright and driven person, and his results at YC and OpenAI indicate they’re probably on to something.

You are correct, failing upward was the wrong word choice once I realized Loopt didn't crash and burn but actually had a ho hum exit. Definitely not a 'failure'.

If I could, I'd rephrase my question of what makes him stand out from all the other thousands of people who have sold companies for ~10m net? From an outside perspective it looks like the biggest success of his career pre-open AI was getting PaulG to like him a lot.

Hence why I'm asking if others can vouch for him being brilliant or something.

"Failure" is still a fair description. Companies that raise that much money usually don't collapse outright. Instead the investors engineer an exit, partly because it returns some money but mostly because it looks better and solidifies relationships both with founders and acquirers.

sold companies for ~10m net

We don't know the exact numbers for this particular case, but you can be sure people lost money. Raising $30m doesn't mean the company was valued at $30m; it means the company was valued at much more. For example if you took $30m in a typical Series A round you'd be valued at $150m. If you then sold for a third of that...

Taking seven years to turn $30m into $43m is a worse rate of return than an S&P500 index fund.

To compare a newly founded startup with an index fund based on the current 500 largest successes is kind of weird.

How is it weird? The point is to compare to a “safe” investment. A successful startup is supposed to have 10x or 100x returns for investors. A 30% return should be considered a failure.

No, the assumption is that you will fail, period.

Why? Anything you (an investor) do with your money should be compared to the lower risk alternatives. If it doesn't at least beat those then it's a failure as an investment.

And FWIW, Loopt sold for $43m, but $10m of that went on employee retention. The investors made $3m on their $30m investment. That's an annualized return of 1.3%. It was worse than a zero risk savings account.

Sure, there are other ways of measuring success. Clearly from Altman's view, life has worked out pretty well, presumably in part because of experiences he had and people he met while spending seven years making his investors 1.3%. But doing worse than a savings account is not on it's own a sign that you are a great leader, and clearly Loopt was a failure for its investors.

This is not how investing works, it's that simple.

If you want bigger returns you will have to accept higher risks.

A single starting company is never an alternative investment compared to a much larger spread across a series of established companies.

Investors work with risk by having certain portions of their available capital earmarked for investments in particular risk segments. Typically a large chunk will be allocated in 'safe' (for want of a better word) investments, which may indeed be index funds, real estate or other such. Another portion may be invested in more risky but higher yield such as larger investments in a single blue chip stock that the investors feel good about. And finally there is the bucket 'gambles'. These are considered very high risk and are either huge wins or huge losses, rarely mid range returns, in fact (for the investors, not the founders) they'd rather the company gambles big than to end up playing it safe.

But if such a company is in a spot where it will likely lose it all and then a plan to end up returning the investors just their outlay is already a huge plus, and if they manage to make the investors look good by posting a return, however slim then that will be a much larger win: investors, especially those with LPs do not like to post write-offs not because of their own book (they pocket their management fees regardless) but because it will impact their ability to raise again.

I should probably write a blog post on this one of these days.

> If you want bigger returns you will have to accept higher risks.

Only in a perfectly spherical economic market. In an efficient market rewards are a function of risk. Lots of founders talk about their secret sauce: information they knew that other competitors did not. Information is not equally known, and economic rents exist, so there are areas where bigger returns are available for less risk. And there are definitely lots of examples where high risks do not have expected high returns!

Information asymmetry is a subject all in its own right, I see it as a modifier, it can obviously improve on the risks but it can also add risks and in some cases taking advantage of it can land you in jail. Typically if there is such information it is communicated to prospective investors as either a trade secret or some other mechanism (for instance: a patent that has been filed) but in the typical start-up setting you are going to have to let other parties know that you have this advantage if you want to get into a position where you can leverage it.

I've come across this a couple of times but in 15 years and 200+ companies not often enough to see it as the big differentiator for success or something that negates the usual risk/reward trade off.

That's so far beyond the point. Yeah, he failed to make the business a unicorn success. He probably still learned an absolute shit ton in the 7 years doing so, and it also wasn't a total flop either.

How does your own age 19 to 26 compare to starting a company, raising $30MM, gaining 5 million users, and eventually selling for a profit? I know I don't compare at all.

I sold my second company for chips, for a price of software and domain name. For couple of years I thought it was a total failure. Then one wise man said that most failed businesses are ending up deep in debt, so exiting net positive is actually is not that bad. Note: we bootstrapped without external investments.

That's why nobody (except the founders, I guess) puts their entire savings in a single startup and builds a portfolio instead. This comparison is meaningless.

i tend to see most success stories as luck of the draw. don't know anything really about sam's journey other than what is here, so can't say i know his specific story, and don't really care.

a super-rich dude might need to work hard, or not, but your born circumstances largely predict your success, imo, as seems to be pointed out by science/stats.

but i figure the key ingredients to getting rich, esp without accomplishing 'much' in a traditional sense, are:

  * born in america, or able to get there at some point
  * not poor, higher level incomes/professions/entrepreneur parents better
  * white
  * male

after that, you've got a real good chance of BIG FINANCIAL SUCCESS, if that's your thing.

add Stanford, and now you're virtually guaranteed big/huge financial success -- the only question now is how successful/rich do you want to be, and how quickly?

just my take.

i just feel like OP was probably looking for a "BUT WHAT DID HE _DO_??"-type of explanation, and i'm like, well, did he meet the prerequisites -- i.e. what were the circumstances of his birth/upbringing? if so, he was born in the top 1% of the top 1% of the global population -- that's a pretty good start.

i don't know anything about Sam's particular situation other than what comments said here.

i do enjoy learning about people who fail upwards or just do really well after having not done much -- you can see if it fits into your worldview, and if not, learn and change your worldview.

ditto the stories of the lower-class-born people who make it big - someone maybe like Mark Cuban (or sam altman? no idea of his bg).

Your stats are completely off. Whiteness does not predict success as many non white ethnic groups are much more successful.

whiteness is a little more complicated than the color of your skin.

and groups of people with non-white skin -- say, Asian Indian Americans -- being able to overcome racism is great, but it should not be required, and they had some advantages:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/01/the-mak...

https://archive.ph/ih2Sa

  The result was an intense form of social engineering, but one that went largely unacknowledged. Immigrants from India, armed with degrees, arrived after the height of the civil-rights movement, and benefited from a struggle that they had not participated in or even witnessed. They made their way not only to cities but to suburbs, and broadly speaking were accepted more easily than other nonwhite groups have been.

What racism did they overcome? What is your evidence of any racism? It seems your definition shifts from moment to moment? Is it any disparities that are measurable, regardless of intent (what you are likely to say when talking about the african american community)? But then other times you want to make racism some invisible thing that has no external effects?

On top of that, you roll out a quote to trivialize a group’s success due to hard work and determination as “social engineering”.

If we had been talking about the Jewish community and you had used that quote, I think many would consider you a bigot, but currently it’s more socially acceptable to attack Indian Americans

you just trolling now, maybe you always were.

I don't know why you're getting worked up by previous posters quote.

As an Asian American you absolutely can attribute our success to "social engineering", we went from rail road workers to laundry mat owners to Harvard graduates. You can't have these kind of change on the societal perception level without some kind of engineering.

I feel like Zuck is just lucky. While some amount of luck (right time, right place etc) is involved in every bog achievement, Zuck seems pretty pathetic when compared to Gates or Jobs.

He is doing one thing well though - keeping Facebook completely in his grip, despite his shortcomings...

Ability to be a hacker or researcher is not on the list of important CEO skills. If I had to collect my (totally unqualified) opinion of most-important skills of a good CEO, I would say:

- Ability to promote a company vision (even if you didn’t invent that vision)

- Ability to recognize and recruit excellent high-level leaders

- Ability to raise money by selling a company vision and instill confidence in investors

- Ability to sell product at the highest levels (e.g manage acquisition, sell to ultra-large organizations, get special gov treatment, whatever “big” sale matters most to the company)

- Ability to crisis manage in the short and long run

As far as I can tell, Sam had a lot of experience in the above in his time at YC and his own startup. On top of this, he had enough connections to get him into the pool of candidates and it looks like a lot of very smart/powerful people in SV are impressed by him when they meet or work with him. Seems like a very good choice to lead to me.

I know it’s Silicon Valley koolaide that good hackers == good CEOs, but it’s not true.

Good comment. I think having strong technical skills is one way to be a CEO (Jenson, Satya, Collison brothers, Drew Houston, Zuch, etc) but my bias is showing and you're absolutely right, those skills are very important, especially if the team is already stacked with amazing technical leadership (Like Ilya Sutskever).

Proly gonna get downvoted for this.

Being in bay area, (being charismatic white male helps), around YC and VC circles, with some traction of previous startup success, it's the perfect place to take high risk, high reward bets.

Bay area is an outlier where you can raise billions of dollars, lose millions per month for decades, incrementally work on a moonshot, that's seen as OK. 1% of successful bets offset the 99% failed. They rain money! Some change the way the world works.

Watching Sama's videos, he has very high conviction on AI, he understands the tech, he is able to get top talent together, he has raised billions in war chest to be a solid contender. I think he makes a fantastic leader.

Cruise is another good example. Kyle Vogt has raised a huge war chest, losing millions a month, far from profitable. However they have driverless cars in SF right now. Other than Waymo and Cruise, no one else has been able to achieve this feat.

The valley is a different beast in that regards. Bottomless capital, high concentration of talent, top tier universities like Stanford and Berkley. It's the place where turning science fiction into reality is highly encouraged.

Sam Altman is not white though.

PG seems to have liked him from the first meeting:

> Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt, had just finished his sophomore year when we funded them, and Loopt is probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded so far. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking "Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19." http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html

He was in this list in 2009: http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html

It's too easy to mix up cause and effect here. Was he already visible so good that pg put them there, or is pg infatuation so influential?

There's probably more than what meets the eye. Too bad for us that sama doesn't write as much as pg does.

I think you have to rate that Paul Graham post as a bit of a miss.

Sam's startup didn't fail miserably, it sold for $40 million, on $30 million raised. You can do worse, but by VC standards, it's not a real success story, let alone what you'd expect from a guy you describe him as one of your top 5 founders.

This doesn't imply an overall assessment of Altman (most startups fail, and so on...). My outsider opinion is Altman's public persona seems ok, it seems like YC did well under his stewardship, etc. But it sure looks like he was annointed. Paul Graham and folks like to talk about how in school, you just try to make the teacher happy. Well, sometimes making Paul Graham happy is really important too.

> let alone what you'd expect from a guy you describe him as one of your top 5 founders.

I've been investing since 2007. One of the things I've seen is a founder that managed to sell a company that by rights should have folded, made a bunch of money for himself and for the investors and ended up starting another one which was a much bigger success. I would bet on that guy any day. The assumption when starting a company is that it will fail. A founder that manages to make it to any kind of exit is already exceptional, and depending on the circumstances their performance may inspire further trust or a reduction of that trust. In this case, apparently even though the business did not see the returns originally envisioned Sam came through in ways that inspired those that invested to increase their trust factor.

And having seen a similar case I don't think that is something strange at all. Maybe another CEO would have caused that $30M to evaporate.

Thanks, that is insightful and exactly the kind of comment I was hoping for I posted this. It's clear I wasn't giving him enough credit for having a net ~15M win off a company he built.

I haven't started a company nor done angel or VC investing, so I obviously down played that part of things.

> I think you have to rate that Paul Graham post as a bit of a miss.

I would disagree. Seems more prescient to me than ever. Gmail became far more important to the free world which I didn't see coming, and SamA lived up to the hype with OpenAI (before OpenAI he was quite accomplished, but OpenAI put him in the history books).

Constantly supposed at how people dunk at founders. Well now that hackernews will give you the answer you can just fail upward and create billion dollar companies

I am not dunking on him, I'm asking why he has such a good reputation that it got him a CEO position of OpenAI. I contrast him with Drew Houston, who I think is absolutely brilliant, someone who was known as being an amazing hacker with an amazing business sense, and now runs a fantastic, large, profitable company.

Or take the Collison brothers, people talk about them as being out of this world smart as well. They have some great talks about their experience building Stripe and their skills at scaling a business are apparent.

I just haven't seen that or heard about Sam's reputation from anyone but PaulG.

You'll notice that all of those people are pretty busy. Founders with a track record that currently have nothing to do have as a rule exited or failed horribly.

>create billion dollar companies

Funny you should say that. OpenAI was launched with a billion dollars in funding. This didn't exactly start out as a bedroom operation.

Presumably he did a really good job running OpenAI- it’s not like it was pre-destined to become the company it is today.

>it’s not like it was pre-destined to become the company it is today

A billion dollars, Ilya Sutskever as chief scientist, and some of the most brilliant young minds in ML.

I say it was.

Yeah he doesn’t even seem like the kind of person that would connect well with a lot of talented ML researchers.

What does that have to do with getting a billion dollars for his chief scientist and ML researchers?

Well he didn’t really get that money. Sam Altman on his own couldn’t have raised 1 billion for OpenAI. He was the CEO but the money was there already. He was largely parachuted in.

I could understand why someone would buy into Musk’s vision even Gates/Jobs etc. Sam Altman seems like a very ordinary guy without any remarkable attributes.

To be fair, deepmind, google brain, others, are are well funded and have been comparatively lackluster (commercially, they are almost certainly doing more legit academic work). And scientists like to do science, it's hard to focus them commercially. Their (openAI's) success suggests good leadership

I'm not sure I'd put Deepmind in a bucket for lackluster companies. Their accomplishments are insane.

I have no real idea about the purpose and inner workings of those Google companies, but being a Google-adjacent company is probably not a great predictor for success, because big G needs to eat to sustain the behemoth and there's also too much fat on these companies to be business savvy, so they seem to serve as G hiring pool, or G vacation destination for burnt out G folks.

Also G companies might aim too high even when they try not to? OpenAI can release a shitty chatbot, but a G subsidiary simply can't, they want to solve proteins, aging, cancer, and then maybe we can chat.

How do you know? OpenAI isn't a commercial success, seems really unlikely they're profitable right now given their penchant for freely available and very expensive tech demos. DeepMind could be in the black based on ML optimization of Google's infra alone. Prolly not but it's at least possible.

http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html?viewfullsite=1

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

and most importantly, from http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

'At YC we spend a lot of time trying to predict how the startups we've funded will do, because we're trying to learn how to pick winners. We've now watched the trajectories of so many startups that we're getting better at predicting them. And when we're talking about startups we think are likely to succeed, what we find ourselves saying is things like "Oh, those guys can take care of themselves. They'll be fine." Not "those guys are really smart" or "those guys are working on a great idea." [6] When we predict good outcomes for startups, the qualities that come up in the supporting arguments are toughness, adaptability, determination. Which means to the extent we're correct, those are the qualities you need to win. 'Investors know this, at least unconsciously. The reason they like it when you don't need them is not simply that they like what they can't have, but because that quality is what makes founders succeed. 'Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you.'

He is also from early batch of YC who co-incidently were very intimately connected with PG.

someone above said zuck was pretty much "luck" which I dont think is true. Even though you might hate him for a lot of things, he is pretty darn smart.

edit add "luck"

> someone above said zuck was pretty much "luck" which I dont think is true. Even though you might hate him for a lot of things, he is pretty darn smart.

I think what a lot of us in the "luck" camp are trying to convey is: There are a lot of "pretty darn smart" people in tech. A LOT. Hundreds of thousands, who could be the next great startup CEO, could be a VP of engineering at BigTech, could lead the next technology team that disrupts $1T industries. They aren't because there are very few of these roles in the world, and only a few of the many "pretty darn smart" people can slot into them. How these roles get distributed among the many talented, brilliant people can only be described as random. For every brilliant, hard working, startup CEO you can point to, I can probably point to 1000 people who are equally brilliant and hard working, but simply didn't roll the dice a thousand times in the exact way the "successful startup CEO" did. The rest of these brilliant minds are often plugging away in obscurity as run-of-the-mill senior software engineers, purely based on the random walk their lives happened to take.

This epitomizes the old adage of

it's who you know, not what you know.

EQ is a stronger kung fu than IQ by far. The ability to networking has not only longer lasting effect but greater than any knowledge you can have. I.E. Elon, Zuck, Jobs, Gates etc....

Being a connector is in of itself valuable for a CEO type.

Lots of CEOs don't have any technical skills directly related to what their company does, nor do they have an entrepreneur background.

This comment from a similar thread over 10 years ago pretty much sums it up:

I just saw Sam Altman speak at YCNYC and I was impressed. I have never actually met him or heard him speak before Monday, but one of his stories really stuck out and went something like this:

"We were trying to get a big client for weeks, and they said no and went with a competitor. The competitor already had a terms sheet from the company were we trying to sign up. It was real serious.

We were devastated, but we decided to fly down and sit in their lobby until they would meet with us. So they finally let us talk to them after most of the day.

We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract."

I think the reason why PG respects Sam so much is he is charismatic, resourceful, and just overall seems like a genuine person.

Companies can “fail”, for all kinds of reasons, even with perfect execution by the founders. I don’t really know why Loopt failed, but based on sama’s track record since, he is definitely a person who makes a huge impact with whatever he does (even if you think OpenAI hype is overblown, as I do).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944

> just overall seems like a genuine person.

Yet he admitted to deceiving a customer in that same anecdote

Pulling such a stunt is a hustler move, as well as deceptive, manipulative, and dishonest.

----

Edit: Sure, dang. I didn't realize UTF-8 magic was frowned upon. Could be a helpful addition to the guidelines if this is the case.

If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> like a genuine person

> we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were

Fake it until you make it or until you lose $51B

That's the SV way.. winner write the history. It's a cool "being resourceful" story when you don't blow the f up, but it becomes fraud when you do.

That sounds like straight up deception, to be fair.

It almost seems like fraud. If somebody is investing in or contracting with a company base on false impressions that were deliberately created by deception then... jeez.

It isn't to the same degree as Holmes saying that the blood machines work, but it is in the same direction.

Wait, is there a definition of "genuine person" for this commenter that I don't know?

The classic Accuracy International switcheroo. Always remembered fondly when it works out, not so much when it doesn't, but it's almost always interesting!

Late to the party, but thought it was worth adding an observation.

I don't know much about Sam Altman, I've read his blog, listened to some of his talks. From what I can see his last few positions have been prominent and related to earlier work... of these roles he has taken he has succeeded in growing the businesses. So it would appear he is probably a good professional manager- a business caretaker. It is a different job than building something from nothing, or producing a difficult technical achievement, but it is an important job. Looking at some numbers (google search), many people rely on him for leadership and decision making, and he has produced good work in those areas. I don't think any of this indicates any level of "failure". And to be honest, if a guy like Sam Altman is considered a failure... I wonder what people would think of me, or other people I admire who do good work but aren't the subject of an incredibly well crafted narrative?

it doesn't give a complete answer, but we might as well start by referencing pg's words himself: https://genius.com/Paul-graham-sam-altman-for-president-anno...

I've flagged this. It is against the rules to explain why you did that but since there is already one 'HN staff downranked this post' comment, here is my reason: I'm getting a bit tired of anonymous low karma accounts posting 'just asking questions' kind of things on HN attacking YC, YC companies, or in this case a person closely associated with YC. Just the tone alone sets my hair on end: "fail upward". That's just nasty.

This isn't the first time this has happened. If you want to come out and make insinuations about a person you should at a minimum flesh out your profile and contribute more than just your 'let's discuss this person' posts and even then it is - in my view - bad form.

edit: absolutely hilarious to see this flagged.

I regret my wording in the title, but it seems harsh to flag something when I’ve engaged in a good faith in the comments simply because I have low karma.

I’ve done a fair bit of open source work and now I work at a FAANG company so I’d like to stay anonymous. Does knowing that make you less likely to flag stuff in the future? It likely shouldn’t…

I flagged it and it had nothing to do with your karma. Do you think this kind of a topic will lead to good discussion or just another rehash of every corporations evil thread that opens up on any negative tech news? The comments are just as I expected: grumpy moaning and comments about meritocracies. These discussions happen on HN every other day.

Remember, running a business is a much different skill set. I think most AI developers and researchers wouldn't be interested in budgets, timelines, investor calls, etc. CEO is on the management/business track, not the technical track.

> "You could parachute [Sam Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you."

http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

tl;dr? PG liked Sam.

When Sam took over YC, it was already well established. He's done little to improve that reputation. As head of YC he secured personal deal flow, made connections, and ended up at OpenAI through those opportunities. What were his qualifications for taking over YC? PG liked him. Why did PG like him so much? Who knows. It wasn't Sam's accomplishments or experience, that's for sure.

Apparently this fondness for Sam was established "3 minutes" after meeting him. When I'm doing interviews and hiring, and the same feeling happens to me? I step back to examine by own bias. For PG? It was just that instant pattern recognition baby. Why question it.

Have you used DALL-E? The bad CEO decisions impacted this product: you can only keep one of 4 generated images (hmm, there should exist a plugin to grab them), there is no way to disable the waterwark with paid credits (screenshot everything!), the prompt bar is right over your work area (this is UX but when CEOs don't eat their dogfood...), and there are many useful art features they could build around DALL-E, but they don't get it, it's a cool demo with a price tag.

I don't know about Sam Altman specifically, but as technical people we are at risk of over-valuing technical work and under-valuing political work. Even in technical fields, political work (getting support of right people, integrating yourself in right communities, aligning incentives) is as (if not more) important as getting the code/math/circuitry right for someone to succeed. Being able to do political work really well would explain his success.

Sam Altman is involved in a large number of things. Then he hops on board the one which looks like it’s going to be the most promising. If it pans out, he stays there.

On rare occasion you can understand some thing well after you have had a few… learning experiences. And sometimes there are edge cases. My flute teacher was a phenomenal flute player and yet thought of herself as an oboist. But she admitted to me that she never played oboe professionally from fear of failure. She played both instruments at pro level and was a wonderful teacher. She just didn’t have it in her to play in an orchestra.

I have always lived on the philosophy that "failing a lot always leads to a win," so it makes sense why Paul G might have been so fascinated with Sam Altman. That could be one thing we can all learn from Sam Altman. As a professional failure, I always try to consistently position myself in great places to get my lucky moment. This means building/joining startups every 6-12 months and finding cofounders.

> Do people who he has advised at YCombinator all agree he's brilliant and insightful? What am I missing?

I have a lot of complaints about some people at YC (specifically those who say a lot of stuff about people in private—or even worse, on bookface—that they don't say in public, and engage in other childish cowardly behavior), and for all I know SamA has said sh*t about me behind my back (but I don't have any evidence he has ever done so nor do I suspect it), but in all of my interactions with him, he has been generous with his time and helped me figure out some key decisions (like when I was deciding whether to sell to Microsoft in 2014, he did office hours with me and helped me figure it out).

He's also put out a ton of honest, insightful, unique content out there that I've learned a lot from.

I think PG did him no favors by basically saying he was the Lebron James of startups when he was like 20 years old or something, but surprisingly he did live up to the hype.

Definitely someone who is able to see the forest from the trees and identify where the key roots are and act accordingly.

You're asking the wrong question. It's not why Sam Altman "failed upward", which I have no opinion on.

The bigger question is why so many still believe in the myth of meritocracy [1]. Altman, if he failed upward, is not an isolated incident. It is not.

The common traits of "success" here are more closely aligned to sociopathy and narcissism [2]. Look no further than Elon Musk, the once richest man in the world.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/19/the-myth-of-mer...

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...

If it so easy then please use the answers here and fail upwards and create billon dollar companies. Sad to see people hate founders and just constantly envy others success

He tried to scan everyone's eyeballs with an orb and failed as well.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

This was such a mass fail lol

I remember thinking Open AI was doomed the day that launched, since that was a clear signal to me that he had zero sense of product market fit.

Well, I was wrong. Good for him, seriously.

I do wonder about the details of his life. Can't find info on his father, only his mother who is described as a dermatologist, which is interesting. Was anyone in his family well-connected in the tech industry?

If his mother was regularly employed as a specialist then the family being high income is a given. Sam posted on Twitter that he received a Macintosh from "my parents" when he was 8 in the early 90s, another sign of high income.

Getting into Stanford and making connections there is certainly plausible, but dropping out and getting funding for Loopt in such short order also raises question marks.

One point missed is the dystopian crypto scheme he helped launch called worldcoin

There's no such thing as a "bad" CEO or an "inept" CEO. If you manage to become a CEO, you are a perfectly fine exemplar of a CEO by definition. The fate of the company is determined by the vicissitudes of a million other things.

Wouldn't that mean Elizabeth Holmes was a fine CEO as well?

She lost, so she was bad. Winning is the winning move

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