Relentless
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?
00:06:45 · Sam Altman
[00:06:45] S1: I was reflecting earlier when you were saying this about how... When I would do office hours at YC, I could always tell who the new founders were because of the way that they reacted to stuff going horribly wrong versus the founder. Because I often didn't know, like, how new a company was, but I could tell if it was, like, a founder in the batch versus a founder that had doing this for a couple of years by their, like, emotional state when they talked about a problem. I think most people think about the opposite of a bad experience as a good experience, and they would rather have the good experience, because it seems like more fun or more pleasant or whatever. But if you think about, like, the opposite of a bad experience is no experience, and at some point in the not distant future, you'll be in no experience land, then, you know, you can be grateful for the bad experience too. Naval Ravikant used to say this thing that I loved, which is if you had, like, a fast forward button on a remote for your life, your life would be over. And so, like, the boring parts, the bad parts, it's, like, much better than no experience. It's all part of the, like, interestingness of... And the kind of, like, emotional depth and range. And I don't know. I find it, like, fairly easy to be grateful for the bad days.