Comment by bookaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bookaway | Hacker News Reader

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PG liked him, because Altman decided to go to great lengths to get PG to like him.

While Drew, Chesky and the Collison brothers were busy building billion dollar companies, Altman took the “shortcut” and made a concerted effort to cozy up to the most powerful man in the room — and it payed dividends. Altman did the same thing in the early OpenAI days by doing flaterring video series interviews with Elon Musk, Vinod Khosla and others [0]. Incidentally, The YC interview with Elon Musk was done the year Musk made a donation to OpenAI (2016),

I still remember PG’s essay where he gave Altman the ultimate character reference (2008) [1]:

>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…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.

(In retrospect, praising Altman for being the “king of cannibals” has a nice touch of gallows humor to it. Hilariously, even recently pg has a seemingly unintentional tendency to give Altman compliments that appear to be character warnings masquerading as compliments.)

In 2009, pg included Altman in the top 5 in a list of the most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years.[2] If this was an observation made from afar, you could easily say it was “prescient”. But objectively at the time, no one could find any verifiable evidence in the real world to justify such an assessment. It wasn’t prescient because pg had became directly responsibly for Altman’s future success, in a case of self-fulfilling prophesy. Altman was often referenced in the acknowledgments of pg’s essays for reading early drafts and is probably referenced more than any other founder in the essays. Altman’s entire streetcred came from pg and also, once he made Altman head of YC, YC. From afar, it looks like a victory for office poltics, a skill incidentally that sociopaths are known to excel at.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnBQmEqBCY0

[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

[2] https://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html

Wouldn't you agree though that from YC Head to being the driving force of OpenAI was largely due to his own merit.

In fact, he started spending less time at YC and more time at OpenAI. At that time, OpenAI had no clear path to becoming the unicorn it is today, and YC was definitely better from a career standpoint. Instead, he went all-in on OpenAI, and the results are there for everyone to see.

Yes, definitely. But becoming the head of YC was also due to his own merit. His merit was persuading the right people. After all, the essay where pg is giving his highest praise is an essay about fundraising.

Will you not agree that him becoming "the driving force of OpenAI" involved some highly publicized back-to-back persuasion drama as well? First he got Ilya and gdb to side with him against Elon, then he got OpenAI employees to side with him against Ilya and the board (a board that accused him of deceiving them). PG reiterated after that drama that Altman's special talent was becoming powerful.

This observation does not necessarily mean someone is a bad CEO, since the job of the CEO is to do good by your investors or future investors. And it's possible to do that without any morals whatsoever. But I think the recent drama did more to drive the competition than some of his investors would have liked.

Edit:

>At that time, OpenAI had no clear path to becoming the unicorn it is today, and YC was definitely better from a career standpoint.

This is very incorrect in my view. The presence of Elon Musk as investor and figurehead and Ilya, Karpathy, and Wojciech as domain experts, not to mention investments from YC members themselves (and the PayPal mafia) made OpenAI a very attractive investment early on.

I suspect (and this is rank speculation from a great distance) that a lot of SV tech leadership (of different kinds) has perceptions that were formed by the era of the Napster saga and haven't been revised since. PG seems committed to the idea that brash young wheeler-dealers can cut corners to win big and nothing really bad will happen as a result; as of recently Brewster Kahle seemed to be convinced that the final triumph of free media was just one more big push away.

Yeah, if I were to describe it more generally, I would say they self-select for techno-optimists. As investors, YC often espouses judging startup’s potential by considering how successful the startup could be if everything goes right, and then working backwards from there to see if it could be possible. I’m not sure if pg has a historic reference that he has a commitment to, since he was a startup founder himself he just may be projecting his personality to the startup founders he’s assessing, but I do think he’s more concerned with “whether the startup has accomplished something impressive despite the odds” and less about how they accomplished it.

They filter for red flags that would indicate a potential for failure for the startup. So if a “lack of morals” has no bearing on a startup’s success, then they don’t bother creating a filter that eliminates that. Nerds often prefer building things instead of dealing with people and often take things at face value instead of suspecting intrigue, and that sometimes makes them susceptible to manipulation. PG has admitted that he himself is bad at noticing certain personality or character flaws and that’s why Jessica was the adult in the room. But Jessica was probably observing the founders to see if there was good co-founder dynamic and other aspects that would affect startup success rather than trying to decipher their moral character. After all, there is no hippocratic oath in the tech sector.

Thanks for your comments. All very insightful.

Re lack of morals: if I’m not mistaken YC explicitly asks for instances where the founders have succeeded to "break the rules of the system" or similar. So you could even argue if anything they prefer founders that tend to bend the rules of required.

On the other hand, pg seems to have strong moral views on certain political topics.

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