“Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny: Is the Head of Y Combinator Fixing the World, or Trying to Take over Silicon Valley?”, 2016-10-03 (; backlinks):
One balmy May evening, 30 of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs gathered in a private room at the Berlinetta Lounge, in San Francisco [for Y Combinator]. Paul Graham considered the founders of Instacart, DoorDash, Docker, and Stripe, in their hoodies and black jeans, and said, “This is Silicon Valley, right here.”…Altman is rapidly building out an economy within Silicon Valley that seems intended to essentially supplant Silicon Valley—a guild of hyper-capitalist entrepreneurs who will help one another fix the broken world…Both men were planning to move to the Valley; Sadika from Israel, and Wallin from Malmö. “The customers are here”, Sadika said. “And you’re one step away from the entrepreneurs at Airbnb and Stripe”…YC provides instant entrée to Silicon Valley—a community that, despite its meritocratic rhetoric, typically requires a “warm intro” from a colleague…Perhaps the most dispositive theory about YC is that the power of its network obviates other theories. Alumni view themselves as a kind of keiretsu, a network of interlocking companies that help one another succeed. “YC is its own economy”, Harj Taggar, the co-founder of Triplebyte, which matches coders’ applications with YC companies, said. Each spring, founders gather at Camp YC, in a redwood forest north of San Francisco, just to network—tech’s version of the Bohemian Grove, only with more vigorous outdoor urination. When Altman first approached Kyle Vogt, the CEO of Cruise, Vogt had been through YC with an earlier company, so he already knew its lessons. He told me, “I talked to 5 of my friends who had done YC more than once and said, ‘Was it worth it the second time? Are you likely to receive higher valuations because of the brand, and because you’re plugging into the network?’ Across the board, they said yes.”…Altman is quietly mining deeper into the Valley: he’s begun to make Y Combinator more like a venture firm. YC had always presented itself as a gentle, helpful angel investor, a force opposed to the ruthless venture capitalists who buy in later and then demand mammoth returns…Bryce Roberts, whose venture firm [Indie.vc] hasn’t been invited to Demo Day for 4 years, since he loaned his admission badge to an associate, said, “The cudgel they wield is ‘We keep tabs on all you guys.’” V.C.s have learned that if they want a crack at funding YC’s top companies they have to offer fair terms, work hard on behalf of their startups, and perform any favors that YC asks. Privately, many complain that YC drives up prices.
…Graham could gauge applicants’ technical skills, and his wife, Jessica Livingston, was a remarkable judge of character. They prized people in their mid-twenties, an age at which, Graham wrote, your advantages include “stamina, poverty, rootlessness, colleagues, and ignorance.”…In 2014, Graham chose Altman—who, at 31, is 20 years his junior—to succeed him as Y Combinator’s president. The two men share a close friendship, a religious zeal for YC, and an inexplicable fondness for cargo shorts…At 130 pounds, Altman is poised as a clothespin, fierce as a horned owl. Even in a Valley that worships productivity, he is an outlier, plowing through e-mails and meetings as if strapped to a time bomb, his unblinking stare speeding up colleagues until they sound like chipmunks. Though he is given to gee-whizzery about anything “super awesome”—Small amounts of radiation are actually good for you! It’s called radiation hormesis!—he has scant interest in the specifics of the apps that many YC companies produce; what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. To determine that, he’ll upload all he needs to know about, say, urban planning or nuclear fusion. Patrick Collison, the CEO of the electronic-payments company Stripe, likened Altman’s brain to the claw machine on a carnival midway: “It roams around but has the ability to plunge very deep when necessary.”
A blogger recently asked Altman, “How has having Asperger’s helped and hurt you?” Altman told me, “I was, like, ‘F—K you, I don’t have Asperger’s!’ But then I thought, I can see why he thinks I do. I sit in weird ways”—he folds up like a busted umbrella—“I have narrow interests in technology, I have no patience for things I’m not interested in: parties, most people. [cf. Gervais Principle] When someone examines a photo and says, ‘Oh, he’s feeling this and this and this’, all these subtle emotions, I look on with alien intrigue.” Altman’s great strengths are clarity of thought and an intuitive grasp of complex systems. His great weakness is his utter lack of interest in ineffective people, which unfortunately includes most of us. I found his assiduousness alarming at first, then gradually endearing. When I remarked, after a few long days together, that he never seemed to visit the men’s room, he said, “I will practice going to the bathroom more often so you humans don’t realize that I’m the AI”
…Two YC partners sat Altman down last year “and told him, ‘Slow down, chill out!’” another partner, Jonathan Levy, told me. “Sam said, ‘Yes, you’re right!’—and went off and did something else on the side that we didn’t know about for a while.” That was YC Research, a nonprofit, initially funded with a ten-million-dollar personal gift, to conduct pure research into moon-shot ideas. [“YC Research” has been renamed “OpenResearch” and is no longer affiliated with YC; YC in 2020 commented that “They have, in fact, been operating independently for several years”] Altman also co-founded, with Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc and SpaceX, a nonprofit called OpenAI, whose goal is to prevent artificial intelligence from accidentally wiping out humanity.
…The ethics, too, have a collegiate clarity. YC prides itself on rejecting jerks and bullies. “We’re good at screening out assholes”, Graham told me. “In fact, we’re better at screening out assholes than losers. All of them start off as losers—and some evolve.” The accelerator also suggests that great wealth is a happy by-product of solving an urgent problem. This braiding of altruism and ambition is a signal feature of the Valley’s self-image. Graham wrote an essay, “Mean People Fail”, in which—ignoring such possible counterexamples as Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison—he declared that “being mean makes you stupid” and discourages good people from working for you. Thus, in startups, “people with a desire to improve the world have a natural advantage.” Win-win.
…“Well, I like racing cars”, Altman said. “I have 5, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival.”… “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.” Thiel told me, “Sam is not particularly religious, but he is culturally very Jewish—an optimist yet a survivalist, with a sense that things can always go deeply wrong, and that there’s no single place in the world where you’re deeply at home.”
Altman makes a list of goals each year, and he looks at it every few weeks. It always includes a taxing physical objective—a hundred-mile bike ride each week; 50 consecutive pull-ups—and an array of work targets. This year, for YC, those included “Better partnership dynamic; decision on [expanding to] China; figure out how to scale another 2×.” The latest list also contains a reminder to fund videos that demonstrate counterintuitive concepts in physics and quantum mechanics (“QM experiment/physics explainers”) and a prompt to reread a Huffington Post article about the regrets of the dying (“I wish that I had let myself be happier”).
He was always precocious and efficient. As a child, in Saint Louis, he grasped the system behind area codes in nursery school, and learned to program and disassemble a Macintosh at 8. The Mac became his lifeline to the world. “Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing”, he told me. “And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you’re 11 or 12.” When he came out to his parents, at 16, his mother was astonished. She told me, “Sam had always struck me as just sort of unisexual and tech-y.” [see also “best little boy in the world”] After a Christian group boycotted an assembly about sexuality at his prep school, John Burroughs, Altman addressed the whole community, announcing that he was gay and asking whether the school wanted to be a repressive place or one open to different ideas. Madelyn Gray, Altman’s college counselor, said, “What Sam did changed the school. It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world.”
He attended Stanford University, where he spent two years studying computer science, until he and two classmates dropped out to work full time on Loopt, a mobile app that told your friends where you were. Loopt got into Y Combinator’s first batch because Altman in particular passed what would become known at YC as the young founders’ test: Can this stripling manage adults? He was a formidable operator: quick to smile, but also quick to anger. If you cross him, he’ll joke about slipping ice-nine into your food. (Ice-nine, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, annihilates everything it touches that contains water.) Paul Graham, noting Altman’s early aura of consequence, told me, “Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful.”
…“Like a stymied startup, Altman then made a radical pivot. Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, who had two young children, were worn out by the work of running YC and had begun looking for a successor. Livingston said, “There wasn’t a list of who should run YC and Sam at the top. It was just: Sam.” Graham said, “I asked Sam in our kitchen, ‘Do you want to take over YC?’, and he smiled, like, it worked. I had never seen an uncontrolled smile from Sam. It was like when you throw a ball of paper into the wastebasket across the room—that smile.””
…Graham has written that the two founders he most often invoked when advising startups were Steve Jobs [a “childhood idol” of Altman’s] and Altman: “On questions of design, I ask ‘What would Steve do?’ but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask ‘What would Sam do?’” Founders in a crisis call Altman first, relying on his knack for high-speed trading in the Valley’s favor bank—“I called Brian and got it sorted out”, he’ll say, referring to Brian Chesky—and his ability to see people as chess pieces and work out their lines of play. One YC founder told me, “Since Sam can see the future, we want him to tell us what’s coming.”
…Altman worked so incessantly that summer that he got scurvy. He excelled at wangling meetings with mobile carriers, and at closing deals with them to feature the app, whose valuation eventually soared to $251.25$1752007 million dollars. Consumers, though, never bought in.
…He had a knack for finding opportunity in chaos. Altman told me that he led the B round at Reddit, a chronically disorganized YC graduate, because “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.” [“Chaos is a ladder”]
…4 years ago, on a daylong hike with friends north of San Francisco, Altman relinquished the notion that human beings are singular. As the group discussed advances in artificial intelligence, Altman recognized, he told me, that “there’s absolutely no reason to believe that in about 13 years we won’t have hardware capable of replicating my brain. Yes, certain things still feel particularly human—creativity, flashes of inspiration from nowhere, the ability to feel happy and sad at the same time—but computers will have their own desires and goal systems. When I realized that intelligence can be simulated, I let the idea of our uniqueness go, and it wasn’t as traumatic as I thought.” He stared off. “There are certain advantages to being a machine. We humans are limited by our input-output rate—we learn only two bits a second, so a ton is lost. To a machine, we must seem like slowed-down whale songs.”
…It was clear what OpenAI feared, but less clear what it embraced. In May, Dario Amodei, a leading AI researcher then at Google Brain, came to visit the office, and told Altman and Greg Brockman, the C.T.O. that no one understood their mission. They’d raised a billion dollars and hired an impressive team of 30 researchers—but what for? “There are 20–30 people in the field, including Nick Bostrom and the Wikipedia article”, Amodei said, “who are saying that the goal of OpenAI is to build a friendly AI and then release its source code into the world.” “We don’t plan to release all of our source code”, Altman said. “But let’s please not try to correct that. That usually only makes it worse.” “But what is the goal?” Amodei asked. Brockman said, “Our goal right now . . . is to do the best thing there is to do. It’s a little vague.”
As the sun set over Atherton, the loveliest town in unlovely Silicon Valley, Altman challenged Geoff Ralston, another YC partner [and Altman’s replacement as YC president], to a table-tennis match by Ralston’s pool…Altman was raising his arms in victory as the founders began to amble in and gaze around at startup Valhalla…Jack Altman eyed a board game called Samurai on the bookshelf and said, “Sam won every single game of Samurai when we were kids because he always declared himself the Samurai leader: ‘I have to win, and I’m in charge of everything.’” Altman shot back, “You want to play speed chess right now?”, and Jack laughed…His mother told me, “I think Sam likes having his brothers around because they knew him when, and can give him pushback in ways that other people can’t. But it’s tricky, with the power dynamic, and I want it to end before it explodes.”
…In March, Altman wrote a blog post announcing his investment in a company called Asana; he was leading a $62.53$502016m C round. To keep your employees aligned, he wrote, it’s vital to have definite tasks and goals, to communicate them clearly, and to measure them frequently, and “Asana is the best way to excel in these 3 areas.” When Jack Altman read the post, he texted Sam, “Ouch!” Lattice was pitching itself as the best way to excel in those areas. Then Jack called their parents, who were flabbergasted. “You still mad at me, Jack?” Altman asked now. As soon as Altman realized the problem—“I wrote a blog post in a rush because Asana asked me to, and I had heard Jack’s pitch so much I must have incorporated some of his language”—he called his brother to apologize and figure out how to fix it. He explained that he hadn’t perceived a conflict: “I use Asana as a to-do list. Lattice has no to-do-list functionality.”
“It wasn’t malicious”, Jack told me later. “It was just Sam going a million miles a minute. Sam did later say, playfully, ‘We will crush you’, but we were already in the making-amends phase.”
…But, to many V.C.s, YC Continuity was more like a destroyer parked in the South China Sea. Bryce Roberts said, “It has to be a way of disrupting Sand Hill Road”—where a number of the Valley’s top venture firms reside. “If Sam isn’t saying it, he’s thinking it. Why own 7% of Airbnb when you can own 25% of it?” 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. That would greatly reduce the sources of funding and expertise for other startups—and concentrate more power in YC’s hands. One leading V.C. said, “At some point, they’ll start cherry-picking their best companies for A and B rounds. I just assume their plan is to disrupt everything and take over the world.”
When I raised this line of thinking with Altman, he got mad. “We will not lead A rounds while I’m running YC!” he declared. “It would cause irreparable damage to our program to cherry-pick our best companies.” Yet Jonathan Levy, the YC partner who helped write the legal framework establishing YC Continuity, observed, “There’s enough leeway in the documents to do whatever makes sense. Look, does Sam have a lot of respect for Sequoia? Yeah. Does he think he could do it better? Absolutely. Will he do it better? Absolutely. Can I see Sam taking over the entire V.C. system? Absolutely. There will be an exception to the original plan, then two exceptions, and then the system will have changed.” [see: “YC Series A Program Investor Access”] …Altman acknowledged the strain on the YC network, with hundreds of nascent companies all wanting the ear of, say, Patrick Collison at Stripe. Noting that Stripe just designated a contact for YC-related inquiries, he said he hoped that YC’s other anchor companies will follow suit.
…Altman’s regime has left some people at YC nostalgic for the homey camaraderie of the early days [see also 2021 on his successor Ralston]. One YC stalwart told me, “Sam’s a little too focused on glory—he puts his personal brand way out front. Under P.G. we had a family feel, and now it’s all institutional and aloof. Sam’s always managing up, but as the leader of the organization he needs to manage down.” When I asked Altman about this critique, he said, “I absolutely could do a better job at managing the organization—it was my chief weakness at Loopt, and I still have some learned helplessness about it. I don’t want to do weekly one-on-ones and let’s-talk-about-your-career-paths. But I think it’s O.K. to have a little mess at the organizational level if we’re making the big decisions right, since those are the ones that bring us all our returns.” 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.”
…One of the first things he did at OpenAI was to paint a quotation from Admiral Hyman Rickover on its conference-room wall. “The great end of life is not knowledge, but action”, Rickover said. “I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. . . . We must live for the future, not for our own comfort or success.” Altman recounted all the obstacles Rickover overcame to build America’s nuclear-armed Navy. [Rickover was controversial for the extent to which he was a “personality cult” which controlled the Navy & politicians, repeatedly extending his retirement, until he was fired by Reagan using a pretext, learning only by hearing it on the radio.] “Incredible!” he said. But, after a considering pause, he added, “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.”