Deep Dive: 10 Ideas from Sam Altman

#1 Most people don’t take enough risk

“I think people have terrible risk calculus in general… almost always A) you’re wrong about what is risky and what is not risky, and B) most people don’t take enough risk—especially early in your career. Being young, unknown, and poor, is actually a great gift in terms of the amount of risk you can take.”

Sam continues:

“I think what risk actually looks like is not doing something that you will spend the rest of your life regretting… So if you really believe in something—if there’s an idea you’re super passionate about—and you take a calculated risk to start a company realizing you may forego a couple of years of steady income and maybe people call you a failure, that’s a great risk to take. And if you don’t take that risk, I think you have a very high chance that you end up regretting that.”

Sam believes most people overrate the risk of reputation damage and embarrassment from trying and failing. It’s worse to not even try:

“One really important thing to strive for in your career is to be a doer, not a talker. And the reason that people don’t do stuff is 1) it’s hard, and 2) it’s risky. And so you have these people that want to dabble in a bunch of different projects, but never be all-in on one… I think that’s really bad. I think history belongs to the doers, and I think you should take a risk and actually do something.”

Full video: Y Combinator “Sam Altman : How To Build The Future”

#2 How Sam decides to invest in a startup after a 10 minute interview

Y Combinator accepts or rejects a company after just a 10 minute interview.

Sam admits he didn’t think you’d be able to do much better than random with only 10 minutes, but he doesn’t think that’s true anymore.

“It turns out that in 10 minutes if the only question you’re trying to answer is: Does this person have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg?… [You don’t get to] 100% accuracy, obviously, but it’s good enough that our business model works.”

Sam continues:

“The obvious thing is intelligence… You can tell that really quickly, much less than 10 minutes… The hardest trait that we’re looking for is determination, and when we’re really wrong one way or the other on a founder, it’s because we were miscalibrated on how determined that founder seemed.”

As Sam explains in the clip, he also looks for clarity of vision, communication skills, and non-obvious brilliance of the idea.

Full video: Khosla Ventures “Startups | Sam Altman”

#3 The most underrated quality is being really determined

“The most underrated quality of all is being really determined. This is more important than being smart. This is more important than having a network. This is more important than a great idea.”

As Sam explains:

“The hardest thing about starting a company is the level and frequency of bad stuff that happens to you… So much of being a successful entrepreneur is just not giving up. We have funded people who had a great idea, perfect background on paper, a great product, and still failed—and it has usually been that they’re insufficiently determined.”

He continues:

“Of course you need a good product and a good market and to be smart, but that’s really obvious. The degree to which being a 3- or 4-standard deviation outlier on determination as a required skill of a CEO is not something that was obvious to me when I started.”

Full video: Talks at Google “The Winding Path of Progress | Sam Altman | Talks at Google”

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