Relentless
00:00:00 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:00:00] S0: Today, I'm sitting down with Sam Altman, the cofounder of OpenAI. A long time ago, you talked or did a talk at Stanford focused on how to start a startup. What is the biggest thing that has kind of shifted over the past, like, ten years since you initially did those talks? [00:00:14] S1: Clearly AI, and what is possible to do now with a small team of people has... And the speed with which you can do it. And also, not only was it possible, but, like, what you have to do to be competitive, given how much the world has shifted, feels totally different. It is amazing to me what a ten week old startup now can look like. And also, if you look like a ten week old startup from ten years ago, you sort of are in bad shape. If you think of [00:00:40] S0: the ten week old startup in your mind today, what is the one that is the best example of a startup that moved extremely quickly? [00:00:46] S1: I don't even know what they're called, but I met a... What will be a startup that is like two weeks old, something like that, that has an entirely redone, sort of office productivity suite, whatever, all made for, like, a world where AI has got to be able to use documents, presentations, spreadsheets, whatever, as a first class consumer. And, I don't know. I felt like it would have been a year's worth of work for a start up pretty recently. [00:01:13] S0: I would assume that if the, like, barriers to starting start ups and the, like, tools out there become more proliferated and all this stuff, you'd assume that, like, harder start ups are easier to start.
00:01:23 · Sam Altman
[00:01:23] S1: What it means to be a hard startup is changing so incredibly quickly that I don't think I have a perfect mental model for what, over the many years that it takes to build a very successful company, what are going to be the really hard and really valuable things. Like, you know, I've heard a lot of people say, well, anything in the physical world is extra valuable right now because software is gonna become free. But, you know, like, it won't be that long until robots get really good and a lot of the expectations of, you know, it's really difficult to make rockets or whatever. That may change, like, quite dramatically. I love times like this. I think startups are... They have the biggest edge when the ground is shifting the most. And when costs are coming down rapidly and cycle times are coming down rapidly, that's when startups really, I think, just have a massive inherent advantage. And that's happening in so many places at once right now that it seems like a great time to be doing startups. And yet, most startups are like, I'm going to go build AI agents for enterprise vertical X. Now that actually will work in a lot of cases. It'll be very competitive, and it may not be like... In fact, I'd say it probably won't be like the most successful defining startups of that era, but it will work. But but given how much the landscape is in flux, I am surprised there are not more people doing the, like, I'm gonna go take on the crazy the crazy thing with this completely new set of tools, and also being willing to truly internalize the fact that scaling laws are gonna continue and planning for the things that are possible or economical this month but will be possible in two years, four years, whatever. So it seems like an unbelievable time to be starting startups, and there's very fertile ground, but there's also... And I... No judgment if this is what people go for. There's this incredible temptation to just, like, go apply today's agents to the easy wins, and I get it. One thing
00:03:31 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:03:31] S0: that you've said throughout the years is you basically try to... Whenever you meet someone new, you try to, like, plot where they are on your mental model of who they are as a person. And then the next time that you meet them [00:03:40] S1: Yeah. [00:03:40] S0: You basically wanna figure out how far or how fast that they progressed. Did that sort of thing and, like, doing this across maybe thousands of people impact your ability to kind of say, okay. The model is this intelligent today. It's this intelligent three months later. Suddenly, can, like, plot this out, and it makes it easy to believe in the growth? [00:03:58] S1: I think there's, like, a general thing behind both of those, which is I just... Like, I developed a great trust in exponentials in people or companies or models. I don't I don't think that... Subjectively, least, it doesn't feel like watching model progress is the same as, like, watching a founder develop. But I think the underlying belief system about the world is the same. If I were still advising startup founders, this is the most important thing I would try to get them to wrap their heads around. And it is evidently hard for the same reason that there's, like, free money left in the market for betting on high growth young founders. And it's like one of... The market is still not adapted enough for that. I think the market is also still not adapted enough for, like, the exponential of model progress is going to continue, And it is okay to start working on things now that require smarter or cheaper models.
00:03:58 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
[00:03:58] S1: I think there's, like, a general thing behind both of those, which is I just... Like, I developed a great trust in exponentials in people or companies or models. I don't I don't think that... Subjectively, least, it doesn't feel like watching model progress is the same as, like, watching a founder develop. But I think the underlying belief system about the world is the same. If I were still advising startup founders, this is the most important thing I would try to get them to wrap their heads around. And it is evidently hard for the same reason that there's, like, free money left in the market for betting on high growth young founders. And it's like one of... The market is still not adapted enough for that. I think the market is also still not adapted enough for, like, the exponential of model progress is going to continue, And it is okay to start working on things now that require smarter or cheaper models. [00:04:57] S0: This idea of constantly shifting chaos, how do you get good at it? How do you get good at operating in a chaotic environment?
00:04:57 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[00:04:57] S0: This idea of constantly shifting chaos, how do you get good at it? How do you get good at operating in a chaotic environment? [00:05:04] S1: I think it's just practice. There are a handful of things that I think no matter how much you intellectually understand take a lot of reps to, like, emotionally be able to handle. And operating in a lot of chaos and trusting that you'll figure it out and it'll be okay and like this is not going be the thing that kills you and you don't quite yet know how you're going to solve it, but you're going figure it out. This seems to me to be something that you can only learn by going through it. Actually, this is a real weakness of young founders is that they have not had the career experience of getting to emotional peace with this, and so they have a very hard time with it in the early days, they eventually learn it, but at, you know, great pain and cost and unforced errors. You definitely will, if you end up in a high stress, sort of impactful job, you will definitely learn how to deal with chaos and function very well through it, at least most people will. But I don't think it's teachable. I think it's only learnable.
00:06:13 · Ty Morse
[00:06:13] S0: You had an interesting thing that you said a long time ago, which is basically like the first time that you experienced this company killing event. It feels like the world's falling apart, and then you make it through. And then by the tenth time, it's not nearly as bad. Yeah. And you're like, well, survived the first nine. This one's probably not that bad. You also had this other idea where you said, at some point, I think it was, like, a year or two ago, you came to the conclusion that shit was always gonna be going wrong. Yeah. And so you kind of had to, like, internalize the enjoyment of experiencing pain or, like, not great things happening. How'd you make that transition?